Editor's introduction.

Late in the summer of 2006, a conversation took place at the Center for Black Music Research concerning future CBMR initiatives. At one point, interim executive director Samuel A. Floyd Jr. paused to reflect, somewhat ruefully, that when he founded the CBMR in the early 1980s, he anticipated that it would have a finite life span. Its programs and publications having fostered a well-established and wide-ranging engagement with black music by the larger community of scholars, it would have fulfilled its mission and thus would have, in effect, put itself out of business.

Similar expectations may have been held by the pioneering scholars of women in music: preliminary studies would lead inevitably to extensive and continuing inquiry. But, as with studies of black music, those of women's contributions to the cultivation of musical traditions have yet to become well established or wide ranging, despite compelling evidence that an understanding of those traditions is incomplete without considering women's essential roles. Nowhere is this more true than in the context of musical traditions of African ancestry. Moreover, although Black Music Research Journal has published individual studies of women in music, this is the first issue dedicated to the contributions of women. As the title of this issue suggests, the articles consider from diverse perspectives the significant role of women in the cultivation of a variety of black music from the late-nineteenth to the early twenty-first century.

Helen Walker-Hill's study of the music department of Western University, located near Kansas City, examines the accomplishments of several of the institution's women faculty and three of its alumnae: Eva Jessye, Nora Douglas Holt, and Etta Moten. Walker-Hill shows how, at the beginning of the last century, Western University was informed by Booker T. Washington's belief in the uplifting of African Americans through vocational education and the subsequent use of those skills in the workplace. Noteworthy is the fact that the careers of Jessye, Holt, and Moten may be seen as exemplifying the virtues of Washington's philosophy: each made important contributions to American musical life through the use of talents initially cultivated during her years at Western University.

While these women's lives might be seen as reflecting the power of the movement to uplift the race, the early career of Shirley Graham came to exemplify the other major school of thought concerning the place of African Americans within a fundamentally indifferent, when not overtly hostile, society: that of W.E.B. DuBois with its call for education beyond the purely vocational, aggressive political action to secure Constitutional rights, and the cultivation of a core group of leaders within African America (the Talented Tenth) to secure those rights for, and thereby empower, the rest of the black population. Throughout much of her life, Graham was politically energized. Important events included a series of trips to Paris where she immersed herself in the intellectual and cultural life of expatriate Africans and African Americans, study at the Oberlin Conservatory, and the composition and performance in 1932 of a three-act opera titled Tom Tom: An Epic of Music and the Negro, apparently the first opera composed by an African-American woman.

Sarah Schmalenberger's critical examination of this work and of Graham's career and ideology reveals Graham to have been a cosmopolitan individual animated with a strong sense of social justice and an equally strong conviction that she was called upon to act publically on those beliefs. Schmalenberger discusses the opera not only as a musical composition but also as a medium through which Graham examined the double consciousness of African American life, first articulated in 1903 by W.E.B. DuBois in The Souls of ...