"African American women have played a pivotal part in rock and roll-from laying its foundations and singing chart-topping hits to influencing some of the genre's most iconic acts. Despite this, black women's importance to the music's history has been diminished by narratives of rock as a mostly white male enterprise. In Black Diamond Queens, Maureen Mahon draws on recordings, press coverage, archival materials, and interviews to document the history...

"Songbooks, a critical guide to American popular music writing, unfolds chronologically, with entries on authors, artists, and topics beginning with William Billings's 1770 New-England Psalm-Singer. Outsiders proliferate in these pages: women and/or writers of color, authors displaced by sexuality, self-educated scholars, elites deviating from norms. Their work routinely took non-academic shapes: compilations of songs, memoirs and biographies, fiction...