Jeffrey Magee is a Professor and Chair of Musicology in the School of Music at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His writings on jazz, ragtime, and American popular song have appeared in American Music, Lenox Avenue, International Dictionary of Black Composers, Musical Quarterly, the Cambridge History of American Music, and the Journal of the American Musicological Society.

This book first came out in hardback in 2005, but the intervening years have done nothing to diminish its status as the volume to turn to for anyone with an interest in bandleader/pianist Fletcher Henderson...

• Preface: Crossing the Tracks in Cuthbert Introduction: Out of the Jazz Tradition 1: A New Negro from the Old South