Black Diamond Queens: African American Music and Rock and Roll by Maureen Mahon (review)

Race. Gender. Genre. These three themes are the refrain of Maureen Mahon's monograph Black Diamond Queens: African American Women and Rock and Roll, in which she explores the forgotten, the rediscovered, and the memorialized Black women in rock. She pays special attention to how their individual vocal qualities, creative voices, and critical voices precipitated and stimulated a genre. Most importantly, Mahon brings to light how significant all the women she surveys were to rock, even while only a precious few became immortalized in the canon itself. An alternate, explanatory subtitle for this account of Black women's contributions to rock might have read, "How a Genre Erased Black Women."

All chapters engage with race, gender, and genre. The Black diamond queens under discussion, however, did not share a singular experience. They were negatively affected in differing degrees depending on how they were forced to engage with these three areas.

Chapters 2 ("LaVern Baker, the Incredible Disappearing Queen of Rock and Roll") and 3 ("Remembering the Shirelles") engage extensively with race by articulating the expectations of twentieth-century America for respectability in the Black middle class that hindered the soloist LaVern Baker and the teenage girl group the Shirelles. Mahon surveys Baker's treatment (or lack thereof) in college textbooks, rock-and-roll readers, and women-inmusic texts, noting even her own neglect of Baker in an earlier edited collection on the history of African American music (pp. 53–54). These artists' visual conformity to respectability—sleek hairstyles and coordinated, elegant dress—disqualified them from the genre of rock even while their rhythmic vocal approaches became a signature of the genre, covers of their songs topped charts, and their vocality explicitly influenced the sonic direction of such artists as the Beatles (pp. 52, 93).

Chapters 4 ("Call and Response") and 5 ("Negotiating 'Brown Sugar'") focus on gender and the physically sidelined women of rock: the Black background singers, groupies, and paramours of famous rockers. Mahon explains how the labor of these cast-out women was rendered invisible, in some cases because of their gender, in others with the added strike of the gendered labor they provided their famous lovers. Chapter 5 is particularly rich with possibility as it takes a detour from the rest of the book in its analysis of the extramusical influence that paradoxically shaped the rock genre. I would have loved an entire monograph on this topic alone—Black women artists and groupies who worked and performed alongside White rockers—something along the lines of the work of Pamela Des Barres, but with a critical Black feminist orientation and focus on women of color (Pamela Des Barres, Let's Spend the Night Together: Backstage Secrets of Rock Muses and Supergroupies [Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2007] and I'm with the Band: Confessions of a Groupie [Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2005]). This chapter focuses on Devon Wilson, Marsha Hunt, Claudia Lennear, and their relationships with famous White and Black rockers. Mahon carefully traces how Black women who performed as background vocalists and collaborators sonically authenticated White rock-and-roll artists (p. 107). A great example of the erasure of Black background singers, which surprisingly does not make its way into this work even when the specific artist is examined by Mahon in chapter 4, is the literal erasing of Darlene Love's authorship in the misattribution of her vocals by Phil Spector (John Clemente, "Blossoms, the," in Grove Music Online, doi:10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.A2248396, accessed 24 June 2021).

Chapter 1, as well as chapters 6 through 8, take the reader through the treacherous terrain of genre for Black women in twentieth-century America, affecting Big Mama Thornton, Patti LaBelle, Betty Davis, and Tina Turner. Thornton represents one end of the rock-genre spectrum and Davis the other. Although Big Mama...