Thesis (Ph.D.)--State University of New York at Buffalo, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

This study investigates the role music played in the Civil Rights Movement as a form of political protest. The first part of the studies analyzed how political protest music was used in the early part of the twentieth-century leading up to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. An analysis of the role of music in African-American culture also provides a historical background to the music-making of the Civil Rights Movement. Specific musical forms such as topical ballads, freedom songs, and spirituals are examined. In addition, musical influences of African culture as well as religious influences on music-making during the Civil Rights Movement are also examined. The second section of the paper investigates the life and murder of NAACP organizer Harry T. Moore of Mims, Florida. Moore’s life and death became the subject of a topical ballad, “The Ballad of Harry T. Moore”, composed in 2001 by musical group Sweet Honey In The Rock. An analysis of the song’s, literary, political, and musical connections to the ideology and music of the Civil Rights Movement, as well as subject matter, gives evidence that places the song within the tradition of the musical protest activities of the Civil Rights Movement