Jack Dappa Blues Heritage Preservation Foundation is a focal point for the research, archiving and raising awareness of African American Traditional Music and the Black Experience!!
The 501c3 Private Operating Foundation founded in 2011 and officially became a private foundation with tax-exempt status under Section 501(c)(3) of the United States Internal Revenue Code on December 14th, 2016. Founder Lamont Jack Pearley and co-founder Denise Pearley felt the urgency to raise cultural and ethnic awareness of African American Traditional music and the Black Experience in America. For the last several years they have researched and presented historical facts tying the heritage and culture that are the foundation of “African American Tribal Music” to being the product of two continents America.
Jack Dappa Blues Heritage Preservation Foundation operates as Jack Dappa Blues Public Media providing intellectual conversations, historical facts, and essential coverage of the African American experience shaped by our community as we work toward a more diverse media outlet by producing original content, public workshops, and events.
Jack Dappa Blues Public Media uses broadcast journalism, film, and multimedia production to produce exciting, meaningful, and historically accurate content that explores and highlights African American Traditional Music and the black experience. Our featured broadcast “Jack Dappa Blues Heritage Radio” not only plays African American Traditional music that dates back to early Black Spirituals and pre-war Blues, but we highlight today’s practitioners of the music, as well as tackle the sensitive topics that relate to the African American experience from the past to the present. Engaging and interactive, Jack Dappa Blues Heritage Radio gives their audience the context in which African American traditions, culture, and social environment are shared through the oral documentation of Blues, Black Spirituals and the like, that reflects the African American community and their different classes throughout history.
Our mission is to celebrate our heritage and preserve Blues music, as we highlight the many events in American History that cultivated our communities and musical expressions.
We work to be a source of information about the living history of African American Traditional Musics and the Black Experience. Through most of our projects, content, workshops, and live events, we promote African American Literacy and the support of African American Literature. Raising cultural and ethnic awareness also means introducing the people we serve to African American history makers that are less known and usually not covered in either mainstream media or today’s educational curriculum. It is also our goal to present the connection of these African American history makers to the actual traditional music that is prevalent in their literature and works.
African American history and Black music are rarely if ever, presented in the context of societal shifts, but highlighted more in the regard of a soundtrack to the African American struggle. We aim to enlighten those we serve to the proper historical context of African American Traditional Musics as a response to past events that shifted the community and environment of African Americans, as well as adjusted the relationships within the communities and with other ethnicities.
Advisory Board:
Our Advisory Board is made up of a collective of individuals that represent our core audience.
Denise N. Pearley
Valerie Turner
Jontavious Willis
Karleton Thomas
Deirdra Skinner
Phill Mintz
Marquise Knox