Books like King of Ragtime: The Story of Scott Joplin
By Stephen Costanza
For the kid who bangs out rhythms on any surface within reach, this is a picture book about where that kind of music comes from and where it can take you. Toe-tapping, warm, and full of syncopated energy
A young left-handed girl picks up her brother's guitar, flips it upside down to play it her own way, and by age eleven has written "Freight Train," a song the world would come to know.
A biography of jazz pioneer Duke Ellington, tracing his rise from playing pool halls and cabarets as a teenager to leading his orchestra through a groundbreaking Carnegie Hall performance of Black, Brown, and Beige.
A lyrical journey through the history of Black music in America, from spirituals and blues to jazz, soul, and hip-hop, packed with over 80 references to real artists like Billie Holiday and Kendrick Lamar.
A Black boy growing up in segregated 1940s North Carolina loves to draw everything around him, but becomes a football star instead — until his dream of making art finds its way to him.
A young boy in New York City who sees art everywhere — in poetry books, museum halls, city streets, and the rhythm of language itself — grows into the painter Jean-Michel Basquiat.
A true portrait of an enslaved man in 1800s South Carolina who became a master potter, shaping massive clay jars and carving his own poetry into them despite the world telling him he had no voice.
A true story about a young inventor who builds his own microphone from a broomstick, a cinderblock, and a telephone, then goes on to engineer the world's first solid-body electric guitar.
A glamorous Hollywood movie star secretly spends her nights inventing — and during World War Two, she develops a groundbreaking communications system the military doesn't take seriously, at first, because of who she is.
A real-life picture book biography follows young Alma Thomas from a childhood soaking up color in Georgia to becoming a celebrated painter — teaching art for decades before beginning her own boundlessly colorful paintings near age seventy.
An aspiring young musician hauls his double bass through busy city streets on the long walk home from school, weaving between crowds while music fills his heart the whole way.
A musical girl from small-town North Carolina, born Eunice Kathleen Waymon, grows into the singer Nina Simone — her sweet voice rising into a thunderous roar of protest during the Civil Rights Movement.
A lonely mole hears a violin on the radio and decides he must learn to play one himself, practicing alone underground for years without knowing who might be listening above.
