"In this book, A. Yemisi Jimoh demonstrates the critical influence of music on the fiction of various twentieth-century African American writers. Exploring novels and short stories by Toni Morrison, John Edgar Wideman, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and others, Jimoh shows how black musical traditions - specifically Spirituals, Blues, and Jazz - are used to shape characterizations and thematic content and to evince ideas, emotions, and experiences."--BOOK JACKET.