The Music Of Black Americans, A History by Eileen Southern (Norton)

Not so much a history as an excellent starting point for Those Who Want To Know More, Eileen Southern's celebrated survey does what all such surveys do it sacrifices death for breadth. The loss is not just detail, what's missing is the subtlety of nuance and context such coherently organised detail provides. Not that the book lacks intellectual organisation, the author knows her stuff and has clearly done her homework. But it's for the generalist, rather than the specialist; as such, it works well enough. Good, but necessarily limited.