The Garifuna Music Reader is the first text to provide scholarly research of all the principal genres of music and music-related rituals of the Garifuna people of Belize and, by similarities in practice and tradition, those of Central America and the United States. This five unit, fourteen chapter anthology explores how the Garifuna interpret their identity, experiences, and existence through traditional songs and dances, contemporary popular music, world music, ancestor rituals, a Christmas processional, and a creolized version of the Catholic mass.

The reader is a...