Hear Me Talkin' to Ya, unlike most studies of the Harlem Renaissance in which music is treated peripherally and in subordination to literary advances, examines how jazz of the period served as a catalyst for the African American community, bolstered the morale of the country, and elucidated the need for social equity. This dissertation will employ an ethnomusicological approach to offer a vibrant picture of American society at a seminal time as well as put forth an understanding of not only what the music was, but why it was: what it meant to its practitioners and audiences, how those meanings were conveyed, and the profundity of its cultural impact. Moreover, it will be argued that the leaders of the Harlem Renaissance, such as James Weldon Johnson, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Alain Locke, privileged a music that championed an elitist, Eurocentric aesthetic and one that was not true to the spirit of the African American population. The crux of my study will demonstrate how three progenitors of jazz: James P. Johnson, Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington, and Thomas "Fats" Waller, all of whom participated in the celebratory era of the Harlem Renaissance, created vernacular music, largely using the blues and jazz idioms, that elevated not only the black population, but the entirety of the United States—thus challenging the Eurocentric epistemologies of Locke and his contemporaries; to date, no scholarship has refuted the position advocated by the black intelligentsia during the period of the "New Negro."