From: Eleanora E. Tate <eleanora>
Date: Mon, 20 Nov 2000 08:53:13 -0500

I can certainly understand the frustration when captions don't give sources. Fortunately, my book African American Musicians does give picture/illustration credits. It lists the page where a photo/illustration is found, followed by the source. The book also contains an extensive bibliography, an index, a chronology, a table of contents, and a glossary. African American Musicians is a collection of biographical profiles of legendary and lesser known African American musicians for the last two hundred years. My biggest challenge was to find as much primary source material as I could so that I would be less apt to repeat inaccurate information. Birth years were among the biggest problems; another was trying to decide just how much of a musician's life to include. As I wrote, I tried to show young readers examples of a musician's neighborhood or community during his/her growing up years.
 That neighborhood or community influenced the style of music that musician eventually produced. i.e., Louis Armstrong grew up in New Orleans, known for its emerging jazz and the old brass bands, and Armstrong became the ambassador of jazz. W. C. Handy grew up during the era of minstrelsy and ragtime, which he loved. He began hearing something called blues in Mississippi from a country band and he ended up being called The Father of the Blues." My fiction books celebrate neighborhoods, communities and the families and children who live there. Creating African American Musicians by concentrating a portion of a profile on the musician's neighborhood (as many as I could)w as the only way I felt that I could write a meaningful book. It was a fascinating project that also gave me more than a few grey hairs. But it was worth it. Eleanora E. Tate
Received on Mon 20 Nov 2000 07:53:13 AM CST