Dissertation (Ph.D.) Florida State University, 2007. / Advisor: André J. Thomas, Florida State University, College of Music. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed 3-26-2008). Document formatted into pages; contains 200 pages. Includes biographical sketch. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ed.D.)--Teachers College, Columbia University, 1952. / Typescript. Sponsor: N. L. Church. Dissertation Committee: J. L. Mursell, L. T. Hopkins. Type C project. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 1999. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 195-199). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 1999. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 195-199). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (D.M.A.)--Memphis State University, 1989. / Typescript (photocopy). Includes bibliographical references (leaf 50).

Thesis (M. A.)--Buffalo, SUNYAB, 1993. / Includes indexes. Bibliography: ℓℓ. 400-402. Also available in print.

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In the U.S., Black childhood has been underimagined. The representational vocabulary of Black childhood is fraught with dehumanizing and adultifying imagery and sounds—from representations of “Topsy” and “Black Sambo” to caricatures of pickaninnies and their many (re)iterations in U.S. popular culture. Popular music is one expressive domain wherein artists and audiences alike have contested and reinforced the peculiar adultification and infantilization that have long haunted Black American life. In the years surrounding the Trump presidency, numerous Black popular music artists made childhood a primary feature of their artistic output through vocal technique, lyrical content, merchandise, music videos, social media, and more. At the precise moment when white innocence was wielded most violently and obviously on the national stage, these artists challenged the assumed goodness and whiteness of innocence and its relation to childhood, performing capacious versions of free Black childhoods to various ends. This dissertation turns to the performance of childhood as a productive domain of inquiry and focuses on four artists/groups—Tank and the Bangas, Chance the Rapper, Jamila Woods, and Noname—all of whom chart a liberatory politics of Black childhood through sound. Through the poetics and aesthetics of their work, I theorize and historicize four interrelated, childhood-adjacent concepts: nostalgia, vulnerability, innocence, and freedom. Methodologically, I attempt to turn the tables on how vulnerability has normally been rendered in ethnographies. I blend (auto)ethnography about my own experiences as a white father of a multi-racial child with critical theory to analyze live and mediated performances of popular music. I look to music as a poetic and aesthetic space with which to not only grapple with the realities faced by Black children in the United States, but also to affirm Black childhood as a space of freedom, play, possibility, and joy. Ultimately, I make two interrelated assertions: (1) foregrounding Black childhood in our social analysis urges the necessity of abolition and (2) popular music is a primary conduit through which we can imagine an abolitionist future free of police, prisons, and the carceral logics that undergird their imagined necessity.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the bands of the armies of the Confederate States of America. This study features appendices of libraries and archives collections visited in ten states and Washington D.C., and covers all known Confederate bands. Some scholars have erroneously concluded that this indicated a lack of available primary source materials that few Confederate bands served the duration of the war. The study features appendices of libraries and archives collections visited in ten states and Washington, D.C., and covers all known Confederate bands. There were approximately 155 bands and 2,400 bandsmen in the service of the Confederate armies. Forty bands surrendered at Appomattox and many others not listed on final muster rolls were found to have served through the war. While most Confederate musicians and bandsmen were white, many black musicians were regularly enlisted soldiers who provided the same services. A chapter is devoted to the contributions of black Confederate musicians.