A cumulative all-holiday carol about a young girl who is trying to get a slice of Granny's sweet potato pie at a family gathering.

Roots music icon Chris Strachwitz is a detective of sounds, an archaeologist of deep American music, the antithesis of the corporate "mouse music" that dominates the American ear. Born a German count, Strachwitz fled his homeland after World War II at 16. In the U.S., he began to carry his tape recorder from sharecropper shacks to roadside honkytonks, from cantina dives to wild blues clubs. His recordings on his indie label, Arhoolie Records, brought...

"Half poems, half prose, 'Dear Angel of Death' braids intimate and public thinking about forms of togetherness. Is one woman a mother, a person in an artworld, a "black"? What imaginary and real spirits are her guides? The title essay proposes disinvestment in the idea of the Music as the highest form of what blackness "is" and includes many forms: philosophical divergence on the problem of folds for black life, a close reading of Nathaniel Mackey's...