Editor's Introduction

Guthrie P. Ramsey Jr. 


This issue of Black Music Research Journal represents an important benchmark in the history of this publication. Since its inaugural issue in 1980, BMRJ has featured articles that treated the philosophy, aesthetics, history, and criticism of black music. Much of the scholarship in the early days of the journal could assume that readers would take the term "black music" at face value, so to speak, and that the qualities defining it could certainly be understood as a "commonsense" notion. Eileen Southern's The Music of Black Americans (1971) had mapped the parameters of the field in the previous decade, and her first-of-its-kind journal The Black Perspective in Music provided the space for chapter-and-verse conversations of intellectual exploration and institution building. When BMRJ appeared, it pushed further into territories of the black musical imagination and moved the field to a higher intellectual plane. In the early days of black music scholarship, there was an often unspoken imperative that the music under consideration was worthy of serious study, a necessity seemingly unfettered by a burden to question the "black" half of the equation. That was then.