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Reviewed by:
  • Songs in Black and Lavender: Race, Sexual Politics, and Women's Music
  • Renée McBride
Songs in Black and Lavender: Race, Sexual Politics, and Women's Music. By Eileen M. Hayes. (African American Music in Global Perspective.) Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010. [x, 231 p. ISBN 9780252035142 (hardcover), $75; ISBN 9780252076985 (paperback), $25.] Bibliography, discography, index.

As long as there has been a category of music labeled "women's music," there have been debates about that label's meaning. Women's music emerged in the early 1970s through efforts of primarily white lesbian and feminist musicians and activists creating music by, for, and about women. A subculture of the women's movement, women's music was politically associated with radical feminism and its view that significant social reform is possible only when the patriarchal capitalist system and values of our society are uprooted. The desire for respite from and repudiation of that social system contributed to the creation of women's music festivals, which continue to this day, albeit in a social and political context quite different from that of the 1970s. Put another way, women's music is "neither dead nor what it used to be" (p. 177). Musically, women's music has sometimes been referred to as WGWG, or, White Girl with Guitar, an impression created by singer/songwriters with acoustic guitar such as Cris Williamson, Holly Near, and Alix Dobkin, who were indeed WGWGs and immensely popular in the early women's music community. This view of women's music reduced its definition to folk-style songs with women-identified lyrics and often genderized instruments—for example, horns were male, while piano and acoustic [End Page 517] guitar were female. While there was more than a grain of truth to this limited viewpoint, in reality women's music has encompassed a broad range of styles and instrumentation, particularly since the end of the "golden age" of women's music in the late 1980s. Another view of women's music, and one in which Songs in Black and Lavender is grounded, is not so much as a particular type or style of music as "a site of women's thinking about music, and an example of the type of community building that the meld of music performance, identity politics, and music consumership can facilitate" (p. 175).

Where do black women fit into the world of women's music? Author Eileen M. Hayes notes that "scholars have not offered a framework for thinking about black women's collective presence in women's music" (pp. 1-2). It is not only that a "minority of critics and scholars see black (predominantly) lesbian involvement in women's music as related to and part of the history of black liberatory struggle, and black women's activism in particular" (p. 4); women's music in general has been marginalized by scholars of both feminism and black music. Literature about women's music currently consists of several dissertations, articles in a variety of disciplinary publications, Bonnie Morris's Eden Built by Eves: The Culture of Women's Music Festivals (Los Angeles: Alyson Books, 1999), and now the study under review. Hayes offers Songs in Black and Lavender as the sole contribution to date to explore black feminist consciousness in the context of women's music and issues raised by the participation of black women in the women's music community. Truly, nothing remotely like this book has appeared in any discipline.

Hayes brings impressive creds (a nod here to Hayes' blending of popular and scholarly language) on several levels to her work. As associate professor of Ethno-musicology, chair of the Division of Music History, Theory, and Ethnomusicology, and affiliated faculty in Women's Studies at the University of North Texas, her areas of research include African American music, feminist theories, queer studies in music and the social sciences, and race in American popular culture. Hayes, who self-identifies as a "straight, black and . . . old-school feminist activist" (p. 10), has attended women's music festivals during the past two decades and was trained as a feminist organizer by lesbian feminists in the early 1980s in Washington, DC, where her activism...

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