This film tells the story of the American civil rights movement through its powerful music; freedom songs that propelled the movement evolved from slave chants, the labor movement, and the black church.
"Soundtrack for a Revolution" is a window into the musical and lyrical soul of civil rights movement. Read the lyrics of the songs that inspired the civil rights movement.
Learn more about the history and legacy of the blackface minstrel show in these excerpts of interviews with historians Dale Cockrell, Eric Lott, Deane Root, Fath Ruffins, and Josephine Wright, writers Ken Emerson and Mel Watkins, and performers Nanci Griffith and Thomas Hampson.
African American music in Stephen Foster's time, Uncle Tom's Cabin takes the nation by storm, Stephen Foster backs Pennsylvania Democrat James Buchanan and the Yale Glee Club nixes Foster.
When young William Foster arrived in Pittsburgh in the year 1796, the town of 1,300 had already begun its transformation from untamed wilderness to industrial powerhouse.
In August 1969, nearly half a million people gathered at a farm in upstate New York to hear music. What happened over the next three days, however, was far more than a concert.
The following sheet music is from the Foster Hall Reproductions: Songs, Compositions and Arrangements by Stephen Foster, created in 1933 privately by Josiah Kirby Lilly, founder of the Foster Hall Collection, which is now part of the Center for American Music at the University of Pittsburgh.
