On Friday, singer and songwriter Erykah Badu released the final segment of a two part BBC Radio 4 series exploring the extraordinary underground music generated by the Black Power movement of the sixties and seventies.

The series entitled "Black is a country" was published today and will only be available online for an additional six day so make sure you listen to this amazing series today!

Below is a snippet from the show’s description:

Black Power – with its symbol of a fist clenched in anger and defiance – politicised African American music in ways the Civil Rights movement had not. The desire for integration gave way to a new, fighting impulse of cultural separatism and self-determination. Politics and music became explosively attuned. From 1968 The Black Arts Movement – ‘the cultural and spiritual sister of the Black Power concept’ – flourished, dedicated to the foundation of an authentic Black aesthetic in literature, poetry and music. ‘The Black Power and Black Arts concept both relate to the Afro-American’s desire for self-determination and nationhood’ wrote the African American philosopher Larry Neale in 1968,’…a main tenet of Black Power is the necessity for Black people to define the world in their own terms. The Black artist will make the same point in the context of aesthetics.’

The quest for freedom had both a musical and political resonance. Musicians opened up new and unexplored worlds of musical possibility. Players like Ornette Coleman and Archie Shepp pioneered the ‘New Thing’ – an avant-garde in jazz, pushing the limits of harmony and rhythm. Music was explicitly pressed into political service: The Black Panther Party even produced its own album of underground anthems ‘Seize the Time’ and Black music as a whole became far more vocal in its opposition to white mainstream society. Poet-musicians like Gill Scott Heron and the Last Poets delivered stinging attacks on the political failure of Civil Rights and the reality of the black experience in cities across America. Meanwhile Africa became as a powerful symbol for a younger generation of black American artists, a source of political identification, spiritual sustenance and often exotic, musical inspiration.

Contributors include: Ornette Coleman, Archie Shepp, founder of the Black Arts Movement Amiri Baraka, Black Arts poet Sonia Sanchez, jazz flautist Lloyd McNeil, Abiodun Oyewole of the Last Poets, Gill Scott Heron’s co-writer Brian Jackson, hip-hop artist Talib Kweli and former Black Panther leader and songwriter Elaine Brown.

Listen to the second part of "Black is a country" on BBC Radio 4’s website.