African American Sheet Music

African American Sheet Music is a database created by the Center for Digital Scholarship located in John Hay Library at Brown University. It is a culturally rich database filled with sheet music, illustrations, lyrics, and music publishing history centering around the lives of African American composers, musicians, singers, dancers, and stage actors. Various descriptions have the holdings set between different collection dates; however, in the search filters researchers can search items between 1800 and 1926, with some years missing in between. African American Sheet Music contains a wealth of information about African American theater during eras such as the Antebellum South, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and Post-Reconstruction. In addition, there are important illustrations for blackface minstrelsy. Approximately 1,455 items are digitized and readily available for research usage.