When a text includes a direct quotation from another book, or from what someone has said, quotation marks are used to mark it off:
Alan Lomax calls the work song a ‘spiritual speed-up’.
But if the passage to be quoted is fairly long it is often set out differently on the page, usually by indenting:
The African musicologist Nicholas Ballanta-Taylor describes it:
Music in Africa is not cultivated for its own sake, it is always used in connection with dances or to accompany workmen. The rhythmic interest of the songs impels them to work and takes away the feeling of drudgery …
When this is done, inverted commas are not necessary.
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