Black Women and Music: More than the Blues (review)

Black Women and Music: More than the Blues is more than an interdisciplinary collection of essays about black women’s contributions to music history. While the collection fills in some of the gaps found in the history of black women’s participation in music, it serves more importantly to challenge how black women writers, performers, teachers, and consumers of music have been written in (and out of) musical histories. Specifically, contributors offer essays that foreground some of the ways in which black women in the United States have negotiated and represented the intersections among race, gender, class, and sexuality in music traditions that have typically excluded, stereotyped, and/or marginalized black women.

Organized into three parts, the volume explores black women’s participation in a variety of music traditions including rap, jazz, blues, gospel music tributes, art music, musical theater, and women’s music festivals. The editors list a number of theoretical frameworks upon which the essays are grounded, and they are careful to single out the influence of scholars engaged in “theorizing black feminisms” on the volume as a whole (1). This collection effectively challenges a monolithic representation of black feminist theory, clearly conveying that a single articulation of black feminism does not fit all black women musicians’ stories. This is evident in the three themes that emerge from the essays: “the consequences of certain types of intersectionality (e.g., race, gender, and most often, heterosexuality), the significance of generation, and black women’s engagement with feminism” (6). Important to note here is the attention given to complicating how black women in music are represented and how they represent themselves. In the paragraphs that follow, I review all essays in the collection, and I point out which essays in each section best exemplify these three themes.

The first part of the collection, aptly titled “Having Her Say: Power and Complication in Popular Music,” contains three essays that focus attention on gender-based power imbalances in rap, blues, and musical theater. Maria Johnson questions the representation of an “authentic” blues performer in her essay “Black Women Electric Guitarists and Authenticity in the Blues.” Drawing on early blues scholar Charles Keil’s work, Johnson offers readers an easily recognizable definition of the typical blues performer:

To be authentic, a musician must be Black, male, old, born into poverty on a farm in the rural South, and taught by a legend on a cheap mail-order or homemade guitar; [he] must also perform in a rustic, ‘rough-hewn’ acoustic style and have struggled, suffered, and remained broke and obscure.

(54)

Johnson goes on to point out how this very narrow construction of blues performers has been used to misrepresent or silence altogether a sustained tradition of black women blues performers. Describing the life and work of four contemporary black women electric guitarists in the remainder of the essay, Johnson challenges whose knowledge and what knowledge counts in the discourse of authenticity in the blues canon.

Even though Charles Nero’s focus is not on the blues canon, he, like Johnson, questions the silencing of the black woman’s voice. In his essay “Langston Hughes and the Black Female Gospel Voice in the American Musical,” Nero makes the case that Langston Hughes was responsible in large part for introducing “the black female gospel-inflected voice as a signifier of blackness to the New York stage and to the musical comedy form” (72). Before Hughes, Nero maintains, black women were relegated to playing characters that were exoticized and uncivilized (i.e., Josephine Baker-type roles). Even though Nero shows how several of Hughes’ plays in the 1950s and 1960s brought black women’s voices trained in gospel musical stylings to the New York stage, he is careful to point out that the women themselves were responsible for their success.

The essay in Part I that most successfully exemplifies the aforementioned three themes of the anthology as a whole is Gwendolyn...