Black Resonance: Iconic Women Singers and African American Literature

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. Angela Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday (New York: Vintage, 1998), 141. 2. Langston Hughes, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” Nation, June 23, 1926, 694. 3. Langston Hughes, The Big Sea (1940; repr., New York: Hill and Wang, 1963), 296; Hughes, Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz (1961), in The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, ed. Arnold Rampersad (New York: Vintage Classics, 1995), 488–493. 4. Carl Van Vechten, “Negro ‘Blues’ Singers” (1926), in “Keep A-Inchin’ Along”: Selected Writings of Carl Van Vechten about Black Art and Letters, ed. Bruce Kellner (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1979), 160–164. 5. Sterling Brown, “Ma Rainey,” in Southern Road (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1932), 62–64; Al Young, “A Dance for Ma Rainey” (1969), in Something about the Blues: An Unlikely Collection of Poetry (Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks, 2007), 22–24. 6. Jack Kerouac, On the Road (1957; repr., New York: Penguin, 1991), 98–99. 7. Edward Albee, The Death of Bessie Smith, in The Zoo Story, The Death of Bessie Smith, The Sandbox (New York: Coward-McCann, 1960), 63–137. 8. Frank O’Hara, “The Day Lady Died,” in Lunch Poems (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1964), 25–26. 9. Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Dutchman, in Dutchman and The Slave (New York: Morrow, 1964), 35; Baraka, “Dark Lady of the Sonnets” (1962), in Black Music (New York: Quill, 1967), 25; Baraka, “The Lady” and “Billie,” in The Music: Reflections on Jazz and Blues, ed. Amiri Baraka and Amina Baraka (New York: Morrow, 1987), 117, 285; Baraka, “Sassy Was Definitely Not the Avon Lady” (1999), in The LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader, ed. William J. Harris (New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 1999), 567–570. 10. Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, as told to Alex Haley (New York: Ballantine, 1965); Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (New York: 228 / notes to pages 2–5 Random House, 1969); Alice Adams, Listening to Billie (New York: Knopf, 1977); Elizabeth Hardwick, Sleepless Nights (New York: Random House, 1979); Ntozake Shange, Sassafrass, Cypress and Indigo (New York: Picador, 1982). 11. Sonia Sanchez, “—a poem for nina simone to put some music to and blow our nigguh / minds—,” in We a BaddDDD People (Detroit: Broadside, 1970), 60. 12. Sherley Anne Williams, Some One Sweet Angel Chile (New York: Morrow, 1982), 37–65; Williams, “I Want Aretha to Set This to Music,” in ibid., 53–55; August Wilson, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (1982), in Three Plays (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991), 1–93. 13. August Wilson, preface to Three Plays, viii–x. 14. E. Ethelbert Miller, “Billie Holiday,” in First Light: Selected Poems (Baltimore: Black Classic, 1994), 179; Fred Moten, “bessie smith,” Callaloo 27 (Fall 2004): 967–968. 15. Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father (1995; repr., New York: Three Rivers, 2004), 92–112. 16. See, for instance, Houston Baker, Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); Kimberly Benston, Performing Blackness: Enactments of African-American Modernism (London: Routledge , 2000); Walton Muyumba, The Shadow and the Act: Black Intellectual Practice, Jazz Improvisation, and Philosophical Pragmatism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). A notable exception to this rule, Farah Jasmine Griffin’s essay “When Malindy Sings: A Meditation on Black Women’s Vocality,” has been important to my work in this book; see Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies, ed. Robert G. O’Meally, Brent Hayes Edwards, and Farah Jasmine Griffin (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 102–125. 17. These musical and masculine biases come together with particular clarity in the work of Houston Baker and Henry Louis Gates Jr. since, as Evie Shockley writes, “Baker’s version of the blues tradition writes out the woman blues singer in favor of the ‘bluesman’ and his guitar, and Gates chooses to ground his theory in signifying, typically a men’s linguistic practice” (Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry [Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2011], 6–7). 18. See Valerie Smith’s characterization of “third-stage” black feminist critics, who analyze the ways in which “the meaning of influence, the meaning of a tradition, the meaning of literary periods, the meaning of literature itself . . . changes once questions of race, class, and gender become central to the process of literary analysis” (“Black Feminist Theory and the Representation of the ‘Other,’” in Changing Our Own Words: Essays on Criticism, Theory, and...