Music in the USA: A Documentary Companion charts a path through American music and musical life using as guides the words of composers, performers, writers and the rest of us ordinary folks who sing, dance, and listen. The anthology of primary sources contains about 160 selections from 1540 to 2000. Sometimes the sources are classics in the literature around American music, for example, the Preface to the Bay Psalm Book, excerpts from Slave Songs of the United States, and Charles Ives extolling ...

• Preface
• Introduction
• Acknowledgements
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Figures and Graphics
• 1540-1770
• 1:Early Encounters between Indigenous Peoples and European Explorers, 1540-1642 (Castañeda, Drake, de Meras, Smith, Wood)
• 2:From the Preface to the Bay Psalm Book (1640)
• 3:Four Translations of Psalm 100 (Tehilim, Bay Psalm Book, 1640 and 1698, Watts)
• 4:From the Diaries of Samuel Sewall
• 5:The Ministers Rally for Musical Literacy, 1720-21 (Mather, Walter, ...