Samuel A. Floyd Jr. is Founder and Director Emeritus of the Center for Black Music Research, which he established in 1983 at Columbia College Chicago. During his tenure at the CBMR, he authored/edited five books, launched two periodical series-including the Black Music Research Journal, and published numerous articles. He has received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society for American Music and has been named an Honorary Member of the American Musicological Society.

Melanie Zeck is Managing Editor of the Black Music Research Journal, the peer-reviewed journal of the Center for Black Music Research (CBMR). Trained as a music librarian and historian, she joined the CBMR in 2005 to provide fact-finding and fact-checking services for the Center's staff and constituents. In this capacity, she has collaborated with and provided extensive informational support for researchers worldwide on a broad range of topics in black music research and history.

Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr. is the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor of Music at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop and The Amazing Bud Powell: Black Genius, Jazz History and the Challenge of Bebop.

"A bold, brilliant, behemoth contribution to the fields of music, cultural and historical studies. This comprehensive treatise will forever change how we hear, understand and converse about the expansive legacy and rich contributions of 'black musics' across the African Diaspora over time. By far Floyd's most significant masterpiece!" - Emmett G. Price III, Executive Editor, Encyclopedia of African American Music

"The Transformation of Black Music reflects the range of curiosity and thinking of a musician and academic pioneer who has tackled the complexities of the African Diaspora from the perspective of an expert whose methodological boldness, leavened by personal humility, has made him a central figure in American music scholarship" - Richard Crawford, Hans T. David Distinguished Professor Emeritus, University of Michigan

"Professor Floyd's last major work stands with Amiri Baraka's Blues People, Albert Murray's Stomping the Blues and Thompson's Flash of the Spirit as one of the most elucidating studies of African music and its legacy."--Downbeat

The authors document the flow of black music from West Africa but also East Africa to the Americas and elsewhere (e.g., India). The emphasis is on classical music at the expense of more popular kinds of black music (the book includes a separate index for classical composers and performers), and what nonclassical music is discussed is mostly circum-Caribbean...The book expresses the hope that folk and popular black music will be inspiration for a black classical music, as was the case in Europe...Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty" --F. J. Hay, Appalachian State University, Choice