For his 1903 classic The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois opened each chapter with musical notes drawn from what he called the “Sorrow Songs.” Also known as slave songs or negro spirituals, these songs were created and sung by enslaved Black people for a variety of purposes. Often infused with Christian themes, many of these songs expressed the profound sorrow and frustrations produced by slavery, as well as hope for deliverance and liberation, either in this life or in the afterlife.

“These songs are the articulate message of the slave to the world,” Du Bois wrote. These songs were also messages that slaves delivered to one another. Songs were sometimes used to spread covert messages, hidden in plain earshot from oblivious slave drivers or slave catchers. It’s believed, for example, that Harriett Tubman used the song “Wade in the Water” as a way to signal to escaping slaves that they should use rivers to throw off their scent so that hunting dogs could not find them.

The Christian content of the spirituals evolved into an elaborate genre of music firmly grounded in the Black churches that proliferated in the post-Civil War United States. This new genre was dedicated to the gospel — the good news of Christianity — in all its forms. This included songs of worship toward God, praise for blessings and soulful pleas for God’s interventions in the enduring troubles of the world.

With the Black church emerging as the predominant social as well as religious institution of Black America, gospel music became a pervasive part of Black culture and influenced generations of musicians and musical genres — Black and white — that arose in this country.

Developing in the American South during the era of Jim Crow and segregation, blues is in many ways the secular successor to sorrow songs. Largely associated with rural areas, blues musicians expressed the hardships of life that existed even under freedom. Covering everything from lost love to poverty to continuing racism, Black musicians in the South combined honest and sometimes explicit lyrics with compelling instrumentation to create a new genre.

While blues was developing in the rural south, jazz grew in urban areas during the early 20^th century and became the dominant form of American popular music. Building upon the rhythms and creativity of earlier ragtime music, jazz prioritized intense and skilled instrumentation, improvisation and crowd-pleasing performances. Jazz grew to be a national and then international phenomenon, filing clubs and eventually concert halls in major cities in the U.S. and Europe, as well.

As the name implies, R&B draws from blues music in both its style and subject matter. This genre, highlighting the vocal aspects of earlier forms of Black music while also allowing for complex instrumentation, has proven particularly malleable and adaptable over the decades. R7B has encompassed the soul music of Marvin Gaye and Otis Redding; the funk of Parliament and James Brown; the pop of Michael Jackson and Prince, and the hip-hop-infused ballads of Toni Braxton and Mary J. Blige. In doing so, the music has addressed unrequited love, uninhibited celebration and unstoppable demands for justice and equality, among many other themes.

Combining elements of gospel, blues and other American genres, a new crowd-pleasing and youth-oriented genre developed in the 1950s. Pioneers such as Chuck Berry and Big Joe Turner combined the gospel of the church and the R&B of the clubs and juke joints into a new sound that was eventually dubbed rock & roll. Over time, this genre became popular among white musicians and audiences in the U.S. and abroad, with acts like Elvis Presley and The Beatles copying the style — and in some cases the actual songs — of their Black predecessors.

In the late ’70s, a group of DJs in The Bronx pioneered new techniques that allowed them to use two turntables to extend the popular instrumental break sections of funk and disco records to keep the crowds dancing at their parties. The techniques of these DJs became so captivating to the audiences that people started watching them and forgot to dance. And so the DJs, and later separate masters of ceremonies, would get on the microphone during these parties and use rhymes and catchphrases to hype up the crowd.

These rhymes soon evolved into full-fledged rap verses, and the records into samples and original tracks, giving birth to a new genre of music dubbed hip-hop. Over the last 45 or so years, hip-hop has taken on various regional flavors and sub-genres — West Coast, southern, gangsta, backpack, trap music — and spread to every region of the world. The musical influences of hip-hop beats have been incorporated into other genres such as R&B and rock. And as the most lyric-heavy of all genres, rap has been used to address every topic imaginable.

Together, these musical genres, born of the creativity, pain and aspirations of the Black American experience, have been definitive features of this country and huge influences on cultures around the world. With Black artists and historically African American genres more ensconced in popular culture than ever, Black Music Appreciation Month is a good time to recognize the breadth and depth of Black music in American history and the world today.