Would America have been America without the Negro people (and the Negro Music)? - W.E.B. DuBois (in The Souls of Black Folk) "Several years from now, when every vestige of slavery has disappeared, and even its existence has become a fading memory, America, and probably Europe, will suddenly awake to the sad fact that we have irrevocably lost a veritable mine of wealth through our failure to appreciate and study from a musician's standpoint the beautiful African music, whose rich stores will then have gone forever from our grasp..."