University of Massachusetts Amherst Subject Research Guides - Music

Database trials

The UMass Library has a trial subscription to the African American Music Reference database. The trial will continue through November 9, 2008.

African American Music Reference
Biographies, chronologies, sheet music, images, lyrics, liner notes, and discographies about blues, jazz, spirituals, civil rights songs, slave songs, minstrelsy, rhythm and blues, and gospel.

In addition to Music databases and the Library catalog, these resources of the UMass Library are useful for jazz research:

Afro American Studies databases
This is a subset of the "Cultural and area studies" database list.
Historical Boston Globe
The entire Boston Globe, searchable, in image files, 1872-1924.
Historical Chicago Defender
Influential black weekly newspaper, searchable, in image files, 1905-1975.
Historical New York Times
The entire New York Times, searchable, in image files, from 1851 to three years ago.
JSTOR
Core scholarly journals from a range of disciplines, dating from the earliest issue of each journal to a few years before present.
WorldCat
The combined catalogs of most U.S. libraries. Material not owned by UMass Amherst can usually be borrowed through Interlibrary Loan.