Throughout the imagery generally associated with the period of American history familiarly known as the Roaring Twenties—the flappers with their Gatsbyesque mansions, the spit-and-polish automobiles with their mile-wide running boards and all those high-frivolity, back-alley speakeasies—you don’t usually find a lot of black faces. This seems especially odd because that slice of the 20th century—the American Century—also represents what we also have come to refer to as our Jazz Age, an acknowledgment of the great flood of cultural contributions, especially in music, resulting from the freeing of slaves half a century earlier that were just them becoming a significant part of mainstream American culture.

In many ways, this speaks directly to the greatest problem of American culture generally: In narrow treatments of the history of blues or rhythm and blues or gospel or jazz, the majority of contributors most frequently turns out to be African-American, but widen the scope to American culture at large and the black contribution suddenly begins to fade into the background. We’re happy to take the music you give us, white America seems to be saying, but we’re not very comfortable giving you full credit for it.

One easy way to begin rectifying this situation is to consider the truly amazing artistic explosion of the Jazz Age that was occurring uptown in New York’s immigrant neighborhood of Harlem, a cultural event we have come to call the Harlem Renaissance.

Read a little F. Scott Fitzgerald and it quickly becomes clear that for white people the main attractions of the Roaring Twenties were accumulating money, experimenting with drugs, especially alcohol, and loosening the social prohibitions regarding sexual behavior. But for blacks during the Harlem Renaissance, all eyes were on a different prize. “To be Negro in 1921 Harlem meant living in the epicenter of cool,” says Shawn Amos, producer of Rhapsodies in Black: Music and Words from the Harlem Renaissance, a 4-CD set from Rhino Records. “Negroes flocked from as far as Vicksburg and the Virgin Isles to tell their stories in song, in print, onstage, in oil, acrylic, and lacquer. And when the collective dust finally settled, a body of work had been created that to this day remains unrivaled.”

Rhapsodies in Black is Amos’ response to a show of paintings and prints of the same name that opened in London in 1997, with an accompanying catalog published by the University of California Press. In retrospect, however, the order of production seems reversed: Not only does this 4-CD set of recently recorded poetry readings interspersed among an extraordinarily complete survey of early-century, African American musical selections make an irrefutable case for the Harlem Renaissance as America’s preeminent cultural flowering, it inadvertently argues as well for music being the preeminent vehicle of expression for the feelings, ideas and beliefs filling the excited air and animating the active imaginations of so many black artists working in various media of the time.

We mostly know the period, for example, primarily from its literary designation, a vaguely academic category that groups Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Thurston with lesser-known writers like Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen and Wallace Thurman. Of visual artists perhaps the best known was Jacob Lawrence, one of the few survivors of the period still alive at the exhibit’s opening. But as Paul Oliver, the British blues scholar, reminds us in a superb essay included in Rhapsodies in Black’s liner notes, the Harlem Renaissance really is best remembered for the emergence of a dignified and extravagant vision of black artistic life, an element supplied at the exhibit by the Harlem photographs of James Van Der Zee, by film clips of the dancer Josephine Baker and the installation of a simulated Harlem nightclub where a soundtrack including many of the selections included here played continuously.

What Amos has done is to help bring a contemporary light to these musical proceedings by asking the créme de la créme of contemporary black artists—beginning with the deeply authoritative voice of Quincy Jones—to contribute readings. The cast is remarkable—including Amos’ cookie-maker dad, Wally “Famous” Amos, actresses Angela Bassett, Debbie Allen, Alfre Woodard and Eartha Kitt, musicians Branford Marsalis, Joshua Redman, Lou Rawls and George Duke, rappers Ice-T, Chuck D and Coolio, and playwright August Wilson, among others—and the readings poignant. Even more enlightening are the pair of essays contained in the liner notes, Oliver’s accounting of the diversity of Harlem Renaissance activity that ultimately gives way to a recitation of the area’s incredible proliferance of nightclubs, and a wonderful attempt by jazz scholar Gerald Early to see the period in cultural and political context, concluding persuasively that we might do well to view the Harlem Renaissance as a precursor for youth-fueled black arts movements throughout the 20th century that culminated in the mid-’80s with the emergence of Hip Hop Nation.

But even a cursory listening to any of these four carefully programmed CDs—each is organized by theme—results in the unavoidable conclusion that the period of music contained here bears still-unappreciated riches beyond comprehension. It doesn’t take long for vaudeville blues to mix with ragtime and boogie woogie piano, or for rural blues to pick up jazz-trumpet flavorings, and before long, it’s one incredible big-band after another—from early Ellington to Chick Webb to Fletcher Henderson and Claude Hopkins—looking for another way to take the vision that much further. Simply accumulation of musical talent here is awe-inspiring: James P. Johnson, Ethel Waters, Eubie Blake, Mamie Smith, Clarence Williams, Ida Cox, Perry Bradford’s Jazz Phools, Bessie Smith, Paul Robeson, Lonnie Johnson, Alberta Hunter, Leadbelly, Victoria Spivey, Louis Armstrong, Ma Rainey, Fats Waller, McKinney’s Cotton Pickers, Cab Calloway, Josh White, Sidney Bechet, Benny Carter, Mezz Mezzrow, Willie “The Lion” Smith, Tiny Bradshaw, Luis Russell, Ellington, Webb, Henderson, Hopkins … and those are just the highlights, without regard for an accounting of essential cuts and famous compositions that also have made their way on here. In the end, the impression is not just encyclopedic in its relevance and all-inclusiveness, the effect is challenging: Put this music and these writers and those artists and photographers and dancers together and don’t you have a case for the Harlem Renaissance being America’s finest hour in the 20th century, certainly our finest black hour?

And if that’s the case, why isn’t it a more prominent part of our cultural history? Shawn Amos and Rhino Records have done us a valuable service here, and one that suggests there’s even more work to be done. So many of these recordings originally occurred in limited technological circumstances, for example, so wouldn’t it be amazing to hear them recreated under modern circumstances, something like what Robert Altman did with Kansas City jazz in the 1930s? Even so, what’s here is the best American history you’re likely to be offered anytime this year, or almost any year, for that matter. Because, finally, what matters to history is not how many records were sold or how many dollars were made but how great the art was and to what extent it prevailed. And in Harlem during the 1920s, American art, especially American musical art, was busting out all over, breaking down artistic and racial barriers, and singing a mighty song for a surprising number of years. This truly valuable boxed set reminds us how important it is, still, that we listen.