This colloquy emerged from a group of music scholars who have been in conversations that engage questions around race, specifically Blackness, and gender. The first published efforts from these conversations resulted in a colloquy for the Journal of the American Musicological Society, “Shadow Culture Narratives: Race, Gender, and American Music Historiography.”Footnote ¹ Dr. Josephine Wright belongs to this group and contributed to that colloquy. At the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for American Music held in Detroit, the city of Dr. Wright’s birth, the group’s members presented a session to honor her; the energy in that session led us to expand those thoughts into this colloquy.Footnote ² Our goal is to celebrate Professor Wright’s legacy, to provide future scholars with a quick entry point into her work, and to acknowledge her continuing impact.

The essays in this colloquy represent a wide range of scholars across the United States and in England whose experiences have been different; all of us have had a direct connection with Dr. Wright through her scholarship. We also have had the pleasure of enjoying her collegiality at conferences and in working groups. In the following essays, Mark Burford outlines Dr. Wright’s biography and research trajectory through discussion of her scholarly production. He is followed by Matthew Morrison and Samantha Ege who have each just published books that build on the archival foundation Dr. Wright helped establish. Morrison and Ege attest to Wright’s inspiration for, and influence on, them as they worked on both sides of the Atlantic. Gwynne Kuhner Brown’s annotated bibliography is the most complete to date listing of Wright’s publications. Our colloquy is framed by two essays, this Introduction and a closing by Denise Von Glahn, that outline the broad themes throughout and reflect our own interactions with the continuing legacy of Wright’s work.

My first connection with Dr. Wright happened when I was still new to musicology. We had both spent formative years in similar places (New York City; Cambridge, Massachusetts; and the Midwest), though at different times. I first spoke to Dr. Wright at an American Musicological Society conference while in early graduate school, and she was one of the very first African American musicologists I had ever met. As an emerging Black female scholar and fellow singer, seeing her made me feel that my voice was allowed to be included in the “every voice” that she helped to “lift” with the invitation to “sing.” From talking with the others in this colloquy, I know that Dr. Wright’s work has had that effect on all of them too, an invitation to belong.

Josephine Rosa Beatrice Wright’s contributions to musicological and Black historical scholarship have been broad, deep, and profound. Perhaps like many scholars of color, she found her way to musicology almost accidentally. Wright was born in Detroit on September 5, 1942, and was raised in Kansas City. Her father, an Episcopal priest, was an organist, and she learned to play that instrument along with piano and violin, but her true love was singing. After receiving her BM from the University of Missouri at Columbia, she studied voice in Munich and at the Pius XII Academy in Florence. While in Italy, Wright met the pioneering scholar of Florentine carnival songs Federico Ghisi and, despite having no idea what musicology was, saw the kind of work he was doing and thought to herself: “I could do that.”Footnote ¹

Wright returned to the United States and wrote her Master’s thesis at the University of Missouri at Columbia on an expressionist composer whose name even she can’t remember. She eventually entered the PhD program at New York University—which she described as “finishing school”— where she was mentored by Victor Yellin, Martin Bernstein, and Jan LaRue. Reflecting her training and interests as a singer, Wright wrote her 1975 dissertation on the secular cantatas of the early eighteenth-century Neapolitan composer Francesco Mancini (1672–1737). For the project, Wright conducted extensive archival research in Naples and elsewhere in Europe, and her work on Mancini continues to be cited by scholars of eighteenth-century Neapolitan opera. Her dissertation, which made her only the second African American to receive a doctorate in Music, represented an important scholarly contribution, sharply honed her research skills, and instilled in her the full intent of becoming a scholar of the Italian Baroque.

That is until LaRue—whom she remembered as fond of making connections—introduced Wright, still in what she calls her “Italian phase,” to Harvard professor Eileen Southern, the preeminent scholar of Black music. It was a life-changing encounter. Advising Wright about the likely career dead end for a Black scholar of European repertory—a skepticism still navigated by Black musicologists today—Southern extended a straightforward but ambitious invitation: “Help me build the source materials in the field of Black music scholarship.” Wright accepted the challenge, and Southern became what Wright describes as “a mentor for life” who inspired her to reinvent herself as a scholar of Black music.

Wright’s pathbreaking scholarship has explored several distinct areas of inquiry. Among these is a body of studies of Black classical musicians in Europe. Drawing on her background as a violinist, Wright authored a series of articles between 1979 and 1990 on the careers of violinist George Polgreen Bridgetower in eighteenth-century England, Cuban violinist José Sylvestre White in nineteenth-century Paris, and the Afro-Cuban Jiménez Trio, a family chamber ensemble that toured Europe in the 1870s. Wright also produced important work on the Black British composer Ignatius Sancho, including a facsimile of collected editions of Sancho’s music. Indeed, in hindsight, Wright’s scholarship can be recognized for laying the foundation for the study of Black musical Europe. Her 1986 article, “Early Black Musicians in Britain,” a contribution to the edited collection, Under the Imperial Carpet: Essays in Black History, 1780–1950, shed important light on Nigerian-born abolitionist and French horn player Olaudah Equiano (also known as Gustavus Vassa), Guinean violinist Joseph Antonio Emidy, the emancipated West Indian slave-cum-charismatic socialite and violinist Julius Soubise, and several other amateur musicians of African descent active in London in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Her work on these figures was and remains innovative for how it attributes the significance of amateur and professional Black musicians not to their status as anomalies but to the ways in which they were fully integrated participants in and shapers of the concert life of their respective locales.

Also deeply impactful was Wright’s research on African American women musicians. Her 1984 article “Black Women and Classical Music,” published in Women’s Studies Quarterly, documented the careers of a transatlantic cohort of women—including Sissieretta Jones, Marie Selika Williams, and Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield—while also reminding us that these women represented, as she presciently put it, just “the tip of the iceberg” of “what promises to become a fertile field of inquiry in black women’s studies.” In the 1992 Festschrift that she edited in Southern’s honor, Wright contributed an article on Black women in classical music in late nineteenth-century Boston, which continued her exploration of the under-recognized Black presence in concert life. The Festschrift was a testament to Wright’s extended partnership with Southern, which over the years produced the indispensable co-edited volumes African-American Traditions in Song, Sermon, Tale, and Dance and Images: Iconography of Music in African-American Culture (1770s–1920s). These stand as a testament to Wright’s fulfillment of her and Southern’s shared mission of providing source materials for future scholars. A standout feature of Wright’s scholarship is her virtuosic research, drawing on previously unexamined sources. She followed Southern’s lead in illuminating for scholars-to-come methodological approaches to the study of Black music, particularly in her 1990 “Bibliographic Guide to Periodical Literature for Black Music Research” and her 2000 state-of-the-field report “Coming of Age: Reflections on Black Music Scholarship.”

Wright had notably important relationships with two academic journals: American Music, which she edited from 1994 to 1997, and The Black Perspective in Music, a journal in which she published pieces on a range of subjects in the 1970s and 1980s. These include two in 1976: a study of the nineteenth-century singer and impresario Orpheus McAdoo and a conversation with jazz trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie. During the 1980s, Wright compiled listings of new music by Black composers for The Black Perspective in Music, an extraordinary catalog of then-new repertory by such composers as Adolphus Hailstork, James Furman, Dorothy Rudd Moore, Betty Jackson King, T. J. Anderson, Leslie Adams, and many others. Wright has built on this documentation of Black composers with her contribution to the textbook African American Music: An Introduction, which appeared in its second edition in 2015. Her chapter “Art/Classical Music” places African American composers—the majority of whom, it is likely, musicologists do not know—in historical perspective, with a narrative stretching from antebellum bandleaders and writers of popular songs, social dances, and keyboard pieces in the Northeast and New Orleans; to musicians who came of age in the Jim Crow era but received academic musical training that enabled them to take on leadership roles at Historically Black Colleges and Universities; to composers active in the present day. Wright’s sketch of the work of Black composers born after 1950 includes Donal Fox, Jeffrey Mumford, and Michael Abels, as well as women composers such as Lettie Alston, Regina Harris Baiocchi, and Nkeiru Okoye. Together, her series of “New Music” listings in BPM and her more recent chronicle of Black composers are an invaluable resource for performers and programmers and should be a routine part of the training of music scholars.

Wright continues to be an active and meticulous scholar, as indicated by her recent contribution to the 2020 Journal of the American Musicological Society colloquy, “U.S. Slave Music through the Lens of the Civil War Press Corps,” part of her current research project. Quietly but mightily, Wright’s stunning body of research has left musicology and Africana Studies with a legacy of exemplary, field redefining scholarly production whose rewards are as inspirational as they have often been unappreciated.

When I encountered Josephine Wright in 2007 at my first American Musicological Society conference, I knew that I was in the presence of greatness. Her regal, luminous air was one that I knew well: Professor Wright carries with her the queenly countenance of the stately Black women I grew up learning from, admiring, and being cared for by in my church and home community in North Carolina. Prof. Wright did not yet know me, as at the time I was brand new to the culture of academic music studies, but she saw me. By “saw me,” I mean that Prof. Wright gave me the care and attention that she gave to so many of us who have come through music studies, specifically in the study of Black music. I soon came to realize that I was speaking with one of the architects of modern Black music study, along with her colleague and mentor, the late Eileen Southern.

In my pursuit of Black music study at Catholic University during my master’s, I discovered the bibliographies co-authored by Prof. Wright that have been foundational to my ability to study Black music, as well as to the discourse itself. These works have also informed my overall methodology and approach as a music scholar. Much of my early musicological training followed in the conservatory tradition within which professors like Josephine Wright and Eileen Southern were trained, including the study of early music. Wright’s foundational scholarship informed my initial research in the practice of deep bibliographic work, gathering source materials, and exploring both traditional and non-traditional archives within my own methodology as a musicologist.

In our current scholarly climate, there are certain approaches within monographs that seem to be more common and/or preferred, as reflected by the current publication lists of several major presses. Books like my own, Blacksound, that espouse the development of a new “theory” are sometimes valued over ones that might take a more traditionally historical approach to studying a specific subject (although, to be sure, my work itself is also historical). Even further, the idea of compiling invaluable bibliographic resources, such as the ones I’m focusing on for this fête of Wright, seems to be mostly out of vogue in our current landscape. Although there is a wealth of bibliographies compiled and shared across social media, the tradition of the deeply researched annotated bibliographies and source materials published by Josephine Wright, as well as Eileen Southern and Dominique-René de Lerma for Greenwood Press’s Encyclopedia of Black Music, has largely escaped us. But, as the title of this essay—“Josephine Wright and the Architecture of Black American Music Studies”—suggests, without these foundational works, the research that I and that many of us pursue on Black music across genres would be thin. Specifically, I want to call attention to Wright and Southern’s monumental volume, African-American Traditions in Song, Sermon, Tale, and Dance, 1600s–1920: An Annotated Bibliography of Literature, Collections, and Artworks.Footnote ¹

This 436-page, 8x10 hardbound publication with 2328 entries is dizzying. It isn’t dizzying because it is not clear; to be sure the volume is executed and organized with the highest efficiency. It is dizzying because when I begin to fathom the number of hours that it took to compile, organize, assess, annotate, and edit two-and-a-half centuries of materials on Black American music from a battery of difficult-to-find sources, I am in awe of the dedication, time, and energy that it must have taken to devote to this meticulous and often thankless work. Professor Wright’s work efforts have allowed for the continued study of Black music, a field that has become one of the most central areas of study and interest in music departments today, despite the challenges that Black faculty and graduate students continue to face within music disciplines.Footnote ²

This remarkable encyclopedic volume breaks down the wealth of materials compiled by Wright and Southern into five parts: the colonial-federalist era; the antebellum era; the post-emancipation era; the WPA Slave narrative collection; and the early twentieth century. Because most of the material dates to the nineteenth century, Wright had to wrestle with the same challenges that I still face in my own work: the ephemerality of material archives of Black music and performance. However, as I have learned from Wright’s and Southern’s methods within this volume, one must listen for music, sound, and performance of Black expression within a variety of materials, a practice that later became a primary method of Black feminist studies, particularly those regarding enslaved peoples. In the preface to the work, the authors note that, in addition to printed and literary materials: “We arrived at the final lists after scanning thousands of widely varied sources: travel books, local histories, personal writings, fiction, non-fiction, slave narratives, court and civil records, and similar publications” (x). Each of the five areas are divided into some combination of the following categories: Literature, Artworks, Collections of Tales & Songs. The sources are further divided (where applicable) into “social activities, “the religious experience,” and “songs.” Revisiting this volume reminds me that, despite our claims of difficulty in tracing the history of music and Black music performance before the recorded era, there is a wealth of material already highlighted through which to explore the history of Black music.

Before I close this tribute to Professor Wright, I would like to point to the innovation already present in this deeply researched bibliographic resource. I’ll do so by quoting the authors again from the preface: “perhaps the most novel feature of the Bibliography is in its inclusion of iconographical materials. Our research activities include combing through art books and periodicals, museum catalogs, the illustrated periodical press, and books of all type in search of pictures that depict aspects of black-American folk culture.” (x). This method of looking toward images for evidence of the improvisational ephemeral acts of Black music making in contemporaneous images precedes Tina M. Campt’s theory of “listening to images” (2017) by almost two decades, and it also shares a relationship with Christopher J. Smith’s 2013 work, The Creolization of American Culture, in which the author uses the paintings of William Sydney Mount to reimagine Black performance.Footnote ³ It also informs my own method in Blacksound of using lithographic images and sheet music covers in an analysis of Blackface and Black performance.Footnote ⁴ Wright and Southern further developed this approach in their 2000 publication, Iconography: Images of Music in African-American Culture (2000), another vital source book of Black music and culture.

I have only scratched the surface of the minutes, hours, days, years, and decades of work that Professor Josephine Wright has gifted to us through her indefatigable work ethic, which has been a critical part of the architecture of Black Music Studies, musicology, and music history in general. Wright’s study of “Ignatius Sancho (1729–1780), African Composer in England,” is just a singular example that demonstrates her scholarly dexterity; it deserves more attention. This particular work is an example of how the deep bibliographic and archival work informed her critical method of writing about mostly then (and sometimes still) unknown Black classical composers.Footnote ⁵ It represents a practice that we are finally coming around to in mainstream musicology, and one that I hope will continue to be informed by the legacy, presence, and impact of Professor Josephine Wright. My deep thanks and gratitude are extended to Professor Wright for all that she has been and continues to be to me and to so many in the pursuit of the study of Black music.

In seeking Black women in classical music history (which has led me to composers including Florence Price, Helen Hagan, and Undine Smith Moore), I also learned of the contributions of Black women in classical music historiography, such as Josephine Wright, Eileen Southern, and Rae Linda Brown. The latter were equally important, esteem-building personal finds, especially given the lack of Black female musicologists in my undergraduate experiences of British academia. I shared these sentiments with Wright in an email on July 4, 2020: “Your scholarship, particularly in conjunction with Professor [Eileen] Southern’s and Dr. Rae Linda Brown’s, has had such a profound impact on my work, and also on my path as a musicologist-pianist—your presence in the academy is very affirming.” The warmth of Wright’s response demonstrated what many of the contributors here have experienced in person. This was further reified on March 25, 2024, at the Society for American Music’s fiftieth national conference in Detroit, Michigan. During the session “Honoring Josephine Wright: Teacher, Scholar, Mentor,” I read Matthew D. Morrison’s paper in his absence and internally felt a sense of transnational dialogue with his reminiscences. My essay picks up on this thread, expressing an international Black perspective on Wright’s impact, and entwining a creative interpretation of my Urhobo name: Oboakorevwe, “what you seek you shall find.”

Images and Reimaginings

Prior to 2020, I had spent time with Wright’s scholarship through the MA degree that became my PhD dissertation on Florence Price at the University of York. During that period, I lived in Singapore—almost ten thousand miles away from the United States (where much of my academic community and inspiration lies) and almost seven thousand miles away from my place of study in England. To learn of Wright’s contributions was not only to find what I had been seeking but to begin actively situating my work in a legacy of Black musicological foremothers. Eileen Southern’s and Wright’s Images: Iconography of Music in African-American Culture (1770s–1920s) was integral to how I approached post-nineteenth-century Black Atlantic art music and its transnational genealogies. I foregrounded this in a lecture-recital I presented at York on October 25, 2017, as part of my master’s thesis, titled, “Florence Price’s Sonata in E minor: Interpreting the Influences of African-American Rural Pasts and Urban Modernities.”

I began not with any spoken introduction but with the music of Price and visuals from Images, projected in a slideshow on the large screen behind me. I started from the final refrain in the rondo-form second movement of Price’s Piano Sonata. My first visual selection established a rural backdrop with Wade Wipple’s wood engraving “Evening at the Quarters” (1887). Southern and Wright introduce this artwork amid a collection of topographical scenes that “offer wide views of the slave quarters of typical plantations, peopled with miniature figures lolling in front of their cabins, conversing with neighbors, or dancing to the music of fiddle, banjo and/or bones.”Footnote ⁴ Indeed, the wide angle of Wipple’s engraving helped establish the spectator as an outsider; the figures are too small to discern and those in the foreground have their backs facing the viewer. This therefore affirmed the audience’s distance on several registers (i.e., historically, geographically, and culturally).

As the final refrain progressed, I sought to conjure up a sense of journeying into the frame. Emphasizing this motion toward interiority was Eastman Johnson’s oil painting “The Chimney Corner” (1863). Rendered in the academic style, Johnson portrays an enslaved Black man engaged in the surreptitious act of reading. The spectator absorbs enough of the detail and form to detect the reader in his quiet solitude—“indeed, his concentration is so intense that he doesn’t notice the fire has burned down to embers.”Footnote ⁵ The dark palette of Johnson’s portraiture not only emphasizes the interiority of this moment but also the illegality of Black literacy in many Southern states at this time. As a result, its dimly lit composition draws the viewer into the shadows of the protagonist’s self-making. That the object of the reader’s focus was possibly the Bible allowed me to segue to scenes of Black religiosity, in anticipation of the refrain’s fervent musical build up.

Correlating with the final refrain’s increased expressivity were images of African American communal dance and music-making. Facial expressions, bodily movements, social interactions, the billows of Black Antebellum attire, and the musical instruments that formed the plantation sound world were significantly more discernible (unlike “Evening at the Quarters”). But as the second movement’s final measures tapered to piano, thinner textures, and an emotional grounding, my choice of images moved from artistically rendered portraits and landscapes to the medium of photography, which has the grounding tendency of rendering the past more “real.” With photos firmly embedded in our modern-day vernacular, the final images served to remind viewers that this history was not so distant and, furthermore, remains very much tethered to our present.

The penultimate image, titled True Lovers of the Muse (ca. 1902) by William Henry Jackson, included in Images as figure 252 but unattributed to Jackson, was a photograph of two itinerant Black male musicians, a guitarist and mandolinist, perched against the window and wooden exterior of an unknown building; joy radiates from their faces while untraceable melodies and harmonies ring from their instruments (Fig. 1). But through performance, I envisioned the ways in which Price’s second movement—with its narrative and nostalgic qualities—could impressionistically suggest these sonic possibilities. Indeed, both the piano and the piece were anachronistic instruments of representation, but my concern was not with the question of authenticity, but instead the question of authority, which impels me to consider: if I am employing performance as research, then who, what, and where are my citations? Which primary and secondary sources are informing my interpretations of Black American folk-infused concert music? How might I engage audiences less with a so-called authentic or definitive performance and more with an authoritative and dialogical interpretation?

At the end of the slideshow, the two musicians from True Lovers of the Muse merged into the cover of Images (Fig. 2), which uses the same photograph. These closing visual mo(ve)ments drew my performance into the scenes and sounds of turn-of-the century Black modernities and into deeper conversation with the authorship and authority of Black women’s historiographies.

Figure 1.

William Henry, Jackson, photographer, True Lovers of the Muse, ca. 1902, Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Detroit Publishing Company Collection, https://www.loc.gov/item/2016794495/.

Figure 2.

Samantha Ege, “Florence Price’s Sonata in E minor lecture-recital, University of York” (1’33”), YouTube, November 1, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IC8MtFluKL0.

Dr. Wright has made a monumental contribution to the field of musicology for over four decades. She has been an indefatigable leader in Black music research, producing a remarkable array of pioneering publications. Her work has introduced generations of readers to music, musicians, and histories that deserve rigorous scholarly attention and would not otherwise have received it. Dr. Wright’s energetic support of other scholars’ past and future work is a distinguishing feature of her career: she has published numerous book reviews, bibliographical resources, and collections of primary sources.

Items within each category below are arranged in chronological order. Compiling this list has been inspiring, humbling, and motivating. I hope it will have a similar effect on others.

With Josephine Wright having received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society for American Music in 2015, and Honorary Membership in the American Musicological Society in 2019, it is easy for the authors of this colloquy to join the professional disciplinary chorus and agree on the impact she has had on the field of musicology. But each of the contributors also has their own personal reasons to celebrate Wright’s contributions to musical scholarship. Individual as their tributes are, a number of ideas return like rondo themes and it is those I will focus on as I offer my own personal outro to this collection of essays.

Multiple authors pointed to Wright’s extraordinary bibliographic work, which has provided the markers and signposts for others to navigate; it has proven to be indispensable, and foundation-building for scholars who followed her. They applauded her virtuosic research into Black classical musicians in Europe who she presented not as exceptions or anomalies, but as “fully integrated participants” in concert life. They spoke of her “scholarly dexterity” when she successfully pivoted from her early European theater of intellectual operation and “reinvented herself as a scholar of Black music.” They used the words “exemplary,” “meticulous,” “inspirational,” “stunning,” and “extraordinary” to describe Wright’s “field-redefining scholarly production.” And more specifically, they acknowledged the ways Wright’s systematic and grounded research methods and values provided a model for their own. The mere existence of this “Black musicological foremother” was affirming to many; her continuing active presence allowed one contributor to actively situate her own work within the legacy of Black scholarship that Josephine Wright played such a powerful role in shaping and handing down.

But the influence of Wright’s work is not confined to her impact on Black scholarship or scholars. I am a white scholar whose work typically intersects only tangentially with that of my colloquy colleagues as regards race, and yet Dr. Wright’s impact on my thinking, my career, and my students runs deep. It may even be growing stronger as I am increasingly conscious of my position vis-à-vis US American cultural history and who gets to tell its stories. I published my first scholarly article in American Music thirty years ago when Josephine Wright was its first African American editor. With her guidance, “A Sense of Place: Charles Ives and ‘Putnam’s Camp, Redding Connecticut’” marked the start of my career-spanning exploration of place, both literal and allegorical, and its role in shaping and reflecting individual and national identity. In an earlier co-convened colloquy with Naomi André, Josephine Wright’s essay, “US Slave Music through the Lens of the Civil War Press Corps,” put on full display her indefatigable research practices. I am inclined to ask: Who else would (could) find an eyewitness account of the practice of the ring-shout during the Civil War by a white reporter? I was present at a symposium of twelve invited scholars focused on the intersections of music, race, and gender when Wright first shared her findings. The group sat in respectful awe as she quietly, confidently, and systematically laid out her evidence. Truth be told, there was something just a little intimidating about suggesting revisions to the woman who had edited my initial foray into scholarly publication, but her graciousness was as complete as her scholarly achievement.

In a graduate seminar that I taught at Florida State University titled “Music, Sound, and Environment”, my students read, listened to, and viewed a range of materials that endeavored to represent, reflect, and respond to the nation’s natural world. Midway through the course we consulted Wright’s and Southern’s Images: Iconography of Music in African-American Culture (1770s–1920s), a book that has been cited multiple times in these essays. In its pages students confronted alternative representations of the nation’s natural environment to the ones they’d already seen: here were images filled with people who knew the land from their close, often forced interactions with it. We had begun the semester reading the idealizing nature-focused writings of the Transcendentalists, several of whom had only an arms-length relationship with the natural world. We had poured over the golden back-lit renderings of the natural world by celebrated Hudson River School painters, so many of which were devoid of people; if they were present, they were only there to provide a sense of scale. We viewed sacralizing documentaries on Yosemite and the nation’s national parks where, through exclusively white, male eyes, the U.S. landscape was cast as something “other” that was outside quotidian realities and invited either worship or conquest. Indigenous peoples made only rare appearances and were as absent in the films as they were in Hudson River School paintings.

Images, with its reproductions of oil paintings, watercolors, engravings, lithographs, and photographs of African Americans interacting with the land and each other in community that was on full display, stimulated a new set of questions. Who gets to represent the nation? How is it represented? Who and what has been included in the nation’s representations, and who and what has been left out?

The sketches, paintings, and photographs of African Americans physically working the land provided a measure of reality to the world they reproduced in their art. Although not necessarily intended to be wholly accurate depictions, these images were not idealized renderings or composites of the best scenes like those plein-air painters had sketched before combining them in fanciful landscapes for sale to their well-heeled patrons. The images in Images pointed us backward and forward: backward to interrogate what we thought we knew about the nation’s natural world, and forward to search for other treatments of that same place by artists and musicians of color whose work had not been included alongside the gilt-framed oils most often reproduced in textbooks.

For my class, Southern’s and Wright’s Images pointed students to look beyond its covers to un-cover the Florida Highwaymen, a group of two dozen African American landscape painters active starting in the 1950s, who got their name from selling more than two hundred thousand paintings from their cars along the Florida highways. They researched Clementine Hunter (b. 1886/7–1988), a self-taught Louisiana-born Creole artist whose thousands of bright-colored paintings captured Black life in the Cane River Valley close to Natchitoches where she grew up. Today her work is in the collections of the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, as well as the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Students also consulted the works of Robert S. Duncanson (1821–1872), a nineteenth-century New York-born free Black who was inspired by Thomas Cole, the founder of the Hudson River School group of painters, and created his own glowing stylized landscape paintings, indistinguishable from works created by his white contemporaries. Here was a corollary to Wright’s discoveries of Black European high-art composers and performers. The two hundred and sixty illustrations in Images provided a peopled counternarrative to the dominant story most often told about “America the Beautiful” and a springboard to students’ discoveries. Along with her mentor, the “quiet revolutionary” Eileen Southern, Wright inspired us to unlearn the stereotypes that might have remained unchallenged. These additional stories coming from the shadows into the light are also part of her legacy.

As recently as the 2024 American Musicological Society conference in Chicago, the session “Rendering Audible: Voice, Creative Practice, and 18^th-Century Airs about African Enslavement” was a testament to Wright’s scholarly recovery work on behalf of Ignatius Sancho, a seldom acknowledged eighteenth-century Black British abolitionist composer. I wondered how I’d not known of him or his work. Although now retired, Wright continues to teach us, and we are still walking in paths that she has cleared. If the significance of a person’s life’s work is commensurate with the good they do, the people they touch, and the lasting resonance of their presence, then Dr. Josephine Wright’s significance is inestimable, will continue, and we are all grateful.