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This final chapter takes a walk through what once was Dvorák's New York neighborhood. It discusses the unsuccessful battle to save the Dvorák House where Dvorák lived from 1892-5. The heightened awareness he brought to the bountiful riches of African American music that helped inspire the Composer-Collector generation — James Weldon Johnson, James Rosamond Johnson, W. C. Handy, Ernest Hogan, and Will Marion Cook — are detailed. It discusses the search for and emergence of a “New African-American Orchestra”, Ford Dabney's theater “roof-top” bands, Hogan and Cook's “Memphis Students Band”, Europe's “Clef Club”, and Cook's “Southern Synchopaters” orchestra, preparing the way for Duke Ellington, “a world-class composer, who stands alone as the foremost American genius who remained loyal to the improvisational, tonal, and rhythmic endowments of African American music”. His universe was an “orchestra” of brilliant jazz artists, one he never found wanting. With a light but firm tether, he drew and followed them along a trail of discovery, leaving glorious artifacts in his path.

Lysa M. Rivera, in “Critical Dystopia and Cyborg Consciousness: Ernest Hogan’s Chicano/a Cyberpunk,” examines the relationship between science fiction and experiences of mestizaje, colonialism, and survival within the greater Chicano/a cultural community. Concentrating on the work of Ernest Hogan, Rivera traces the ways in which Hogan embeds Mesoamerican indigenous mythologies in high-tech, technophilic science fictionalized futures and comments on the synergistic affinities between experiences of alienation under colonialism in the Americas (specifically Mexico) and experiences of posthuman, decentered technologies. Rivera then situates Hogan’s work within an electrifying but unexamined genealogy of Chicano/a cyberpunk produced in direct response to the shifting terrains of borderlands politics in a post-NAFTA late capitalistic world. Drawing on cyborg consciousness as an oppositional practice, Rivera expresses how Chicano/a cyberpunk represents a critical incursion into the classic cyberpunk of the 1980s.

This chapter examines the American cultural revolution brought about by the ragtime operetta, Clorindy; or, The Origin of the Cakewalk, and how it initiated a reevaluation of Negro music and its place within a cultural market dominated by white ideologies and sensibilities. In their performance, Will Marion Cook and Ernest Hogan inaugurated new considerations of Negro music, by disrupting many of the rigid distinctions African American intellectuals held between folk/formal and high/low (and many others). Most significantly, the duo called attention to a historical process that turned the folk music of the American slave into the sound of modern America. In the first and second decades of the twentieth century, Negro music resounded as a rhythmic dance music representing not only African American modernity, but U.S. modernity more broadly.

This chapter talks about a musical ensemble known as the “Memphis Students”. It tells of how Cook stole the group away from their original organizer, took them on a European tour, and how their performances were praised. It narrates that In Abyssinia represented the most elaborate efforts to date of Jesse A. Shipp, Alex Rogers, Bert Williams, and Will Cook. It also discussed that Cook also composed and conducted stage shows at the Pekin Theater in Chicago. It shows that the theater encouraged many talented performers to become members of its Negro Stock Company and that it was also responsible for the early development of many singers and actors who later acquired national fame. It then tells of the end of the golden age of black musical comedies, brought by the death of Ernest Hogan, George Walker, and Bob Cole.

This chapter explores Mark Twain's life-long fascination with ethnic humor and caricature, highlighting the oxymoronic logic involved in his affection for “the genuine nigger show” and other forms of patently racist entertainment. This book traces the history of minstrel comedy in America and its transformation during the late 19th century into a new set of comedic conventions, including the “coon show” and the “variety show.” The chapter also explores the relationship between Huckleberry Finn's illustrations, which draw heavily on “coon” imagery and the novel's ostensibly “realist” tendencies.

This chapter describes Nathaniel Clark Smith, an important African American composer, bandmaster, and the foremost black musical educator of his age; Sweatman’s tenure with the Smith Band from 1895–98 and possibly a period from the summer of 1899 to the late spring of 1900; Smith and his Pickaninny Band’s tour of Australia and the Far East with comedian and composer Ernest Hogan’s troupe in summer 1899; and Sweatman’s move to St. Louis in late 1901, earning a living as a professional musician in a city already bursting with musical talent.

Rhythmic elements that were to become associated with ragtime, and which were recognized as clichés for African American music, were used on the minstrel stage in the 1880s. The term “rag,” identified as a music style by 1893, had previously been applied to dance events going back at least to 1881. The full term “ragtime” first appeared in print in 1896, having been popularized, and perhaps originated, by Ben Harney. One of the earliest and most popular pieces identified as a rag was the “Bully Song,” which had six publications with slightly different titles and different composers claiming credit, suggesting folk origin. The “Bully Song” is a “coon song,” a popular style that disparages African Americans with coarse, stereotypical language. Instrumental music called rags began appearing in 1897, most emphasizing rhythms associated with syncopated cakewalk music.