
In higher education, “You don’t know what you don’t know” is often the axiom that spurs research to shine a light on a subject not thoroughly illuminated. For Emily Green, music historian and faculty member in George Mason University’s College of Visual and Performing Arts, this maxim served as a motivator to launch a 4-VA@Mason research project titled Music of Early Black Virginians. Green, whose previous research focused on music publishing and marketing in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century western Europe and America, became especially interested in the backstory of this area of music history while teaching Nineteenth-Century African American Music, a graduate course at Mason
Green recognized that much of this important music history needed to be cataloged and made publicly available. “It was a long-standing wish of mine to create a resource for educators to help them understand the variety of genres in Black-American music,” she explained. “K-12 music educators do not always have access to library databases or peer-reviewed journals. I wanted to create an open-access landing point to help teachers navigate the rich resources they can use to learn and quickly enhance their knowledge—and build lesson plans for students of a variety of ages.”To that end, Green sought the involvement of scholars in the field at several 4-VA partner schools to help her put the project into motion: Mary Caton Lingold at VCU and Bonnie Gordon at UVA. Both readily volunteered their time to bring this multi-level and multi-faceted research to fruition. Michael Nickens (a.k.a. Doc Nix — most recognized as the leader of George Mason University’s “Green Machine,”) also eagerly joined the team. Additionally, Maria Ryan, at Florida State University, came on to collaborate on the project.
4-VA funding provided UVA graduate students Laura Carrington OBrion and Sergio Manuel Silva and George Mason undergrads Crystal D. Williams and Jaelin Mitchell the time and space to build a website of nineteenth-century sources that reference Black-American music making: https://masonlibraries.gmu.edu/blackmusic/s/music-black-va/page/home.
From there, the team then published a wide-ranging website Early Black Music in Performance https://earlyblackmusic.4va.gmu.edu/.
A zoom conference helped introduce and promote the site: Presenters included 4-VA cohort, Kayondra Reid, music educator at Oak Street Elementary School in Falls Church, VA, and Tyler Diaz, Hunter College, NY. Artist Shodekeh Talifero also gave a presentation for the Dewberry School of Music entitled “Breaths along the Potomac.”
As an added bonus resulting from the effort, Green, Lingold, and Ryan have been contracted to develop a related anthology for Oxford University Press, Sources in Early Black Atlantic Music, which is expected to be published in 2026.
“Most music educators are not taught much about the variety of Black American music in bachelor’s or master’s degrees in our field. Between the database and the web resource, and soon the anthology, our hope is that educators can learn more about reliable print and online resources to use in the future,” says Green.