I: Race and the Freedom Principle in Nineteenth-Century America
2. A Child of the River and the South
3. Antebellum Black Music and White Minstrelsy
6. Black Minstrelsy and the Rise of Ragtime
II: African American Music and the White Response
7. Race in America from the 1890s to the 1920s
8. The Primal Blues, Their First Popularizer, Their First Star
9. The Birth of Jazz, in New Orleans and New York City
12. White People and Jazz and Its Flowering in New York
13. The Flood, and the Blues That Followed
16. “Spirituals to Swing” and After
17. Bop and the Music of the ’40s
18. Muddy Waters and Louis Jordan Change the Blues
20. The Beats and Folk Emerge and Jazz Ascends
III: The Man Who Brought It All Back Home
22. Bob Zimmerman Becomes Bob Dylan