There are many ways to express and preserve culture and traditions. Some convey it through literature, some through spoken word, and others through the various arts, ei—painting, music, performance, and dance. Jackie Merritt uses the arts to tell the story of the blues people. The art of painting, singer/songwriting, and performance. Merritt is a cultural bearer extraordinaire whose roots in painting and the love of acoustic guitar galvanized her on a journey to becoming one of the premier Black Traditional Music practitioners who works to make sure the people of the music and experience live.

The Blues and Hip Hop constitutes over one hundred years of black expression. They are both oral and aural documentation of the black experience in the Americas. Furthermore, the expression is unique and specifically formulated as a response to black in America. According to Louisiana native and blues legend Chris Thomas King, 'Blues' was created in New Orleans.

It is the middle of a Sunday afternoon when I finally connect with Teeny Tucker, a woman born into blues royalty whose made a lane all her own. She is all blues, all the time. A blues songstress and a songwriter who is as much of a blues historian as she is a blues activist.

When Ma Rainey Comes to town,

The blues is healing. The blues is freedom. That is the message I take with me everywhere I perform. As an African American blues artist, I feel it is essential to have a clearer understanding of this music. Sadly, the real knowledge of what this music is about is too often overlooked. Blues began out of a need for African Americans to seek healing and freedom in a society that denied them both. This music allowed black folks a way of expressing their humanity in a world that, for 400 plus years, refused them of their humanity. The blues was a way of saying, “we matter.”

Langston’s commitment to the preservation, documentation, and the raising of awareness regarding African American music, tradition, cultures and communities culminate in his making significant contributions to the black folk narrative, black folklife and the many expressions birthed in the urban and rural landscape of African American life.

On May 25th, 1894, Anna Julia Cooper, an African American activist, educator, and writer, spoke at a Hampton Normal School (now Hampton University). Invited to speak at a Folklore Conference, Cooper delivered a speech in a large assembly hall, addressing an audience of teachers, trustees, Hampton graduates, and folklore society members. What did she discuss that Friday evening? African American folklore.

On June 20, 1859, the schooner A.C. Brewer left New Orleans wharf bound for Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Onboard were 200 free people of color, mostly families, who planned to emigrate to Haiti permanently. They were answering a call from the Haitian government for African Americans to put their skills to work in the service of the first independent, Black nation in the western hemisphere. The young island-nation needed sailors for its ships, field workers for the abandoned sugar and coffee plantations left by French planters after the revolution, and other forms of nation-building.

Determining if slave breeding actually occurred or if it is merely a myth has been for the academy one of the most controversial topics in the study of American slavery. Sources such as slave narratives, oral histories, and abolitionist materials were assumed to be unreliable, and plantation financial records documenting the practice have yet to be located. While professionally trained historians are generally incredulous that slave breeding existed, black American collective memory continues to testify to its truth.