Little Receipts Vol. 2 — Sing, Dance, Shine! Music and Joy Makers (Standard Companion Edition — Interactive Edition)

A New Orleans boy with almost nothing gets a cornet and a teacher, and practices until the notes behave — young Louis Armstrong. Mahalia Jackson carries the songs of her church from New Orleans to the biggest stages in the country, and will not change the song to get there. Duke Ellington writes music the way other people write letters — the sourced counts of his songs start above a thousand, and the book prints the counts it can source, not the biggest number it has heard. Marian Anderson, turned away from a Washington, D.C. concert hall, sings instead on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1939, before a crowd put at 75,000. Chuck Berry helps invent rock and roll and popularizes — the book's word, because it is the true one — the duckwalk; he did not invent it, and the chapter says who walked it before him. And Berry Gordy turns an $800 family loan, in January 1959, into Hitsville — with 'Shop Around' told as Motown's first million-seller, in exactly that scope and no bigger.

Inside the Interactive Edition (STANDARD COMPANION EDITION, 11,573 words): the complete book, all 6 chapters; recorded narration by Marcus — 56.78 minutes; a chronological timeline; a 10-question educator quiz drawn strictly from the text; every chapter closes with its sources and a method note — receipts first, contested numbers labeled, never silently repeated; the storybook-style cover. For educators: a TEKS correlation sheet for this volume is available with the Little Receipts Educator materials — mapped against the adopted Texas standards, claiming only what the sheet claims. These materials make classrooms eligible, not district-adopted.

The chapters: The King of Jazz Learns to Play: Young Louis Armstrong · Mahalia Sings the Room Awake · Duke and the Band That Dressed Sharp · Marian Sings for Everybody at the Lincoln Memorial · Chuck Berry and the Duckwalk · The Motown Family Band: Berry Gordy Builds Hitsville. Little Receipts is the first series from The Digital Black Voice written for young readers first — the receipts are still real, built chapter by chapter from a research dossier of checkable facts. Big history. Little readers. All receipts.