Lizzo looked uncharacteristically nervous as she crossed the stage in a glittering mesh leotard with tights and sequined combat boots.

A classically trained flutist who began playing when she was in fifth grade and considered studying at the Paris Conservatory, she has woven flute into many of her songs, has played virtually with the New York Philharmonic, and her flute, named Sasha Flute, even has its own Instagram page.

But waiting for her on Tuesday night was an exquisite (and highly breakable) musical instrument that had arrived at her concert in Washington under heavy security: a crystal flute that a French craftsman and clockmaker had made for President James Madison in 1813.

“I’m scared,” Lizzo said, as she took the sparkling instrument from Carol Lynn Ward-Bamford, a curator at the Library of Congress, who had carefully removed the flute from its customized protective case. “It’s crystal. It’s like playing out of a wine glass.”

As the crowd roared, Lizzo played a note, stuck out her tongue in amazement, and then played another note, trilling it as she twerked in front of thousands of cheering fans. She then carried the flute over her head, giving the crowd at Capital One Arena one last look, before handing it back to Ms. Ward-Bamford.

“I just twerked and played James Madison’s crystal flute from the 1800s,” Lizzo proclaimed. “We just made history tonight.”

It was a symbolic moment as Lizzo, a hugely popular Black singer, rapper and songwriter, played a priceless instrument that had once belonged to a founder whose Virginia plantation was built by enslaved Black workers. And the flute had been lent to her by Carla D. Hayden, the first African American and first woman to lead the Library of Congress.

The moment came together after Dr. Hayden asked Lizzo on Friday to visit the library’s flute collection, the largest in the world, with about 1,700 of the instruments.

Dr. Hayden wrote on Twitter: “@lizzo we would love for you to come see it and even play a couple when you are in DC next week. Like your song they are ‘Good as hell.’”

Lizzo responded without much hesitation.

“IM COMING CARLA! AND IM PLAYIN THAT CRYSTAL FLUTE!!!!!” she wrote.

Lizzo arrived on Monday, with her mother and members of her band. Dr. Hayden and staff members ushered her into the “flute vault,” and gave her a tour of the collection, which includes fifes, piccolos and a flute shaped like a walking stick, which Lizzo said she might want as a Christmas present.

Lizzo spent more than three hours at the library, trying out several instruments, staff members said.

She played a piccolo from John Philip Sousa’s band that was used to play the solo at the premiere of his song, “The Stars and Stripes Forever.” And she played a plexiglass flute, made in 1937, filling the ornate Main Reading Room and marble Great Hall with music, to the delight of library workers and a handful of researchers who happened to be there.

“Just the enthusiasm that Lizzo brought to seeing the flute collection and how curious she was about it,” Ms. Ward-Bamford said in an interview on Wednesday. “It’s been wonderful.”

Most of the collection — including Madison’s crystal flute — was donated in 1941 by Dayton C. Miller, a physicist, astronomer and ardent collector of flutes.

Madison’s flute had been made for his second inauguration by Claude Laurent, a Parisian craftsman who believed that glass flutes would hold their pitch and tone better than flutes made of wood or ivory, which were common at the time.

The flute’s silver joint is engraved with Madison’s name, title and the year 1813. “It’s not clear if Madison did much with the flute other than admire it, but it became a family heirloom and an artifact of the era,” the library said.

The library believes that the first lady, Dolley Madison, might have rescued the flute from the White House in 1814, when the British entered Washington during the War of 1812, although it has not found documentation to confirm the theory.

Only 185 of Mr. Laurent’s glass flutes remain, the library said, and his crystal flutes are especially rare. The Library of Congress has 17 Laurent flutes, it said.

When Lizzo asked if she could play Madison’s crystal flute at her concert on Tuesday, the library’s collection, preservation and security teams swung into action, ensuring the instrument could be safely delivered to her onstage.

“It was a lot thrilling and a little bit scary,” Ms. Ward-Bamford said.

Or as Lizzo told her cheering fans after she played the instrument: “Thank you to the Library of Congress for preserving our history and making history freaking cool. History is freaking cool, you guys.”

Lush and immersive, dreamlike and daring, Black psychedelia was a world of big colors and feelings, the peak of which was Eddie Hazel’s guitar solo at the start of Funkadelic’s 1971 album “Maggot Brain” — a 10-minute sonic funeral, thick with echo, inspired by the bandleader George Clinton’s direction that Hazel play as though he had just learned his mother was dead. That work spoke to the distinction between Black psychedelia and the science fiction-based strain of Black creative pursuit that it would energize (with Clinton at the helm): Afrofuturism. While Afrofuturists such as Sun Ra, Samuel R. Delany and Octavia E. Butler tended to privilege future worlds or outer space — the “absolute otherwhere,” as the Black poet Robert Hayden once wrote — Black psychedelics tended to focus on the present, the earthly plane. They drew absurdity and sublimity from ordinary sites, such as New York’s Central Park (as in Greaves’s postmodern documentary “Symbiopsychotaxiplasm”) or a highway underpass in Los Angeles (as in Nengudi’s 1978 performance “Ceremony for Freeway Fets”). Their totems of transcendence were birds rather than stars; their vehicles of transport were dreams and drugs, not time machines or spaceships.

“Excuse me for a minute. Just let me play my guitar, all right?” Hendrix asked the crowd at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival while covering Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone.” This was, on the one hand, a coy device — he was going to follow his muse through the song with or without the audience’s consent — but it also signaled a cognizance that Black psychedelia was built on: Not everyone was going to get it, but you would find out who your people were by seeing who came along.

THE TERM “PSYCHEDELIC” is thought to have originated from the Greek words for “soul” (psyche) and “reveal” (deloun). The force of that revelation was audible. Near the end of the Chambers Brothers’ biggest hit, 1967’s “Time Has Come Today,” which features the refrain “My soul had been psychedelicized,” Lester Chambers unleashes a series of carnivalesque screams. These are not primal shrieks of fear or rage, Chambers, now 81, tells me, but assertions of an uninhibited spiritual state: “I’m happy. I can do this. I can do this because it’s all right!” The psychedelic era was a time of extended solos, concept albums, double albums, a time in which even song titles announced creative largess (Isaac Hayes’s 1969 track “Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic”). These innovations, as deployed by Black artists, did not announce a narcissistic break with the status quo (to “turn on, tune in, drop out,” as Leary said of his LSD-inspired life philosophy) but a thrust toward the utopian. At a time when everyone seemed to be stretching out and taking the true believers in, the interplay between Black and white men had just as much impact on rock innovation as, say, the legendary day when Dylan introduced the Beatles to cannabis at Delmonico’s Hotel in New York.

Although they are rarely given credit for doing so, Black psychedelic artists pioneered the integrated rock band: The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Love, Rotary Connection and the Chambers Brothers all had Black and white members. (Reversing the white trope of describing Black domestic workers as being “just like one of the family,” the Chambers Brothers affectionately introduced their white drummer Brian Keenan as “Brian Keenan-Chambers” onstage.) While earlier jazz artists such as Charlie Parker and Billie Holiday had used drugs, they were often criminalized or institutionalized for it. The majority-white spaces that Black psychedelics entered — whether integrated bohemian clubs such as New York’s Electric Circus or, indeed, Woodstock — were less heavily policed than Black jazz scenes and so allowed Black artists a greater degree of freedom.