African American music has been a major contributor to the cultural landscape of America. Its evolution from religious chants, field hollers, work songs, and cadences of African captives in America to the multibillion industry that it is today has been the subject of much research and scholastic inquiry. With the exception of a very few, most of these studies and published results have not been done by the musicians themselves from start to finish. The approach of this writing is to produce an ethnography where the subjects of study, i.e., the Colored Musicians Club and the AFM Local 533 are also the researchers, writers, and publishers of the study. The intended outcome is the first comprehensive twenty-first-century social history of African American music as it evolved in Buffalo, New York.
