The sheet music in the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection represents a broad scope of African American musical genres of the late 19th and 20th centuries. Ragtime and black musical theater, concert spirituals, the blues, and early jazz all figure prominently in the collection. The collection also includes a significant volume of minstrelsy scores ranging from Zip Coon, a Famous Comic Song to the minstrelsy compositions of African American composers, most notably, Gussie L. Davis. While minstrelsy, jazz, ragtime, musical theater scores and concert arrangements of spirituals comprise the major genres of the collection, there are also several compositions from the latter half of the twentieth century: the decades of rhythm and blues, soul, and funk . . .

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