From Tudor Trumpets to Modern Beats: A journey through Black British music history

Libraries are places of quiet, reflective study, but not the British Library at the moment, which thumps to the sound of music in an exhibition that spans 500 years of black music in the UK.It starts back in Tudor times, but in fact, most of the exhibition is modern, covering the past century or so, as that’s where the main story lies.
Back to the olden times, and the earliest record of a musician of African descent in Britain is John Blanke, a trumpeter in King Henry VII and VIII’s