How Black Music Took Over the World

One of the world’s greatest bassists lays down the heart of Black music, revealing how its rhythmic structures and the long history of the African diaspora made it the world’s most popular form.

“A revelatory new book.”—New York Times

Why do Bob Marley, John Coltrane, Aretha Franklin, and Nina Simone move us the way they do? What drives the worried notes of the Delta blues? What makes Beyoncé’s triumph Cowboy Carter inescapably great?

As Melvin Gibbs shows in How Black Music Took Over th...