I’ve been blessed with dope friends, and Maureen Mahon, a cultural anthropologist and associate professor at NYU, is one of them. Her latest book, Black Diamond Queens: African American Women and Rock and Roll, is a powerfully argued, and extremely accessible, exploration of the ways that gender, race and genre obscure and erased Black women’s contributions and achievements in rock music. Charting the cultural shifts of the music landscape from the 1950s through to the present day, Maureen highlights the careers and contributions of women who worked as both background singers and those whose careers didn’t quite take off as expected–Merry Clayton, Devon Wilson, Marsha Hunt, Claudia Lennear–as well as some well-known and iconic singers such as Big Mama Thornton, LaVern Baker, The Shirelles, LaBelle, Betty Davis, Tina Turner and Brittany Howard.
I love her use of the term “legibility.” In this context, Maureen uses the term to indicate the way that the construction of rock culture, as a space primarily for white, male power and authenticity, made it difficult, if not impossible to see and understand the role that Black women had in shaping rock music and having their contributions recognized. The book also provides examples of how some women were able to compensate for their barriers put in the way (at least to some extent).
Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton
Here, Maureen notes Elvis’s debt to Big Mama Thornton:
Presley’s versions of African American rhythm and blues did not erase blackness in the way that the covers recorded by white pop singers such as Pat Boone or Georgia Gibbs did. Instead, he produced a black sound, drawing his predominantly white audiences into a sonic experience whose overt racial mixing was at once enticing and illicit. Recording industry executive and popular music historian Arnold Shaw points out that “To Southern white ears, Elvis sounded so black that [his producer Sam] Phillips had him appear on a local disk jockey show where he identified himself as a student at the local white high school. Both Presley and Phillips felt that without that identification, his record might not be played or sell well in Memphis.” Presley could mine blackness, but he could also fall back on his whiteness when the need arose.
LaVern Baker
She highlights singer LaVern Baker’s important contributions to rock’s evolution, but notes the reasons for her disappearance from the narrative:
Baker’s disappearance from the genre is a consequence of both the unstable definition of rock and roll during the 1950s and the redefinition of the form that took place in subsequent years, as “rock and roll” was relabeled “rock.” Much of this work involved the realignment of gender and race in relation to musical production and occurred in publications that covered the rock scene. The founding of counterculture music magazines Crawdaddy in 1966 and Rolling Stone in 1967 and the emergence of serious rock criticism that explored the aesthetics and politics of popular music pushed women and African Americans to the outer limits of rock and roll discourse and representation.25 Musicologist Norma Coates notes that “in its early years, [Rolling Stone] not only covered rock culture, but in large part helped define and characterize it. At the same time, the magazine limned out the boundaries of rock culture and sorted out its insiders and outsiders.”
Further, publications such as Crawdaddy and Rolling Stone defined what was in and out of the rock canon:
In a discussion of the context in which these processes occurred, music historian Bernard Gendron observes, “Crawdaddy and Rolling Stone were virtual white male fraternities” whose writers denied “cultural accreditation to contemporary black music” through “benign neglect.” The resulting marginalization of black music at the end of the 1960s, Gendron argues, “seemed to reflect a deepening division between the marketing and functions of white and black popular music” in which “album rock’ became a code for the art end of the pop spectrum and soul’ and funk’ for the entertainment end”; this led to “a disproportionate diversion of the more valuable types of cultural capital toward white rock, leaving the lesser coinage for soul.”
Baker paved the way, but received little recognition:
Baker made her contribution and then disappeared from view. The fact that she was an African American woman worked against that contribution being fully acknowledged in histories of a genre that had developed a profile as the purview of white men. The irony is that rock and roll’s association with white artists and audiences is a result of the success that Baker and other black musicians had promoting their music to white teenagers during the 1950s. The crossing of boundaries is central to the development of rock and roll, with maverick artists and rebellious fans breaking the rules of American segregation.
Remember the times. American segregation was very much the norm, particularly in the South, so even White people embracing music that was derived from Black expression elicited strong pushback:
The fact that white youth were embracing black rock and roll was particularly disturbing to conservative whites adamant about maintaining the racial status quo. The (white) Citizens’ Council of Greater New Orleans issued a plea: “Help Save the Youth of America. Don’t Buy Negro Records…. The screaming idiotic words, and savage music of these records are undermining the morals of our white youth in America.” The idea that black music was “pulling the white man down to the level of the Negro,” as the Secretary of the North Alabama White Citizens Council put it, fueled the outcry of white segregationists. They had reason to be concerned. Involvement with the music could promote the attitude that white singer, guitarist, and songwriter Buddy Holly revealed to his mother when he returned home to Texas after his first Feld tour. Responding to her question about “how he was getting along with Negroes,” he is said to have replied, “Oh, we’re Negroes, too! We get to feeling like that’s what we are” This was exactly the kind of attitude that encouraged white conservative animus toward rock and roll.
The Shirelles
Maureen also highlights the role that growing up in the Black church played for many women who became background and lead vocalists:
The African American women vocalists who engaged in these collaborations had grown up attending black Protestant churches in which music was a critical part of worship. They sang as members of the congregation, and many participated in church youth choirs. Through church-based music training, they developed knowledge of solo and ensemble singing, arranging vocals, and singing harmony. They learned a large repertoire of songs and internalized a performance style that they carried into the rock and roll arena. “Baptist and Pentecostal choirs were something of a farm system for the pop-music big leagues,” Darlene Love quipped in her autobiography. “Aretha [Franklin], Patti LaBelle, Gladys Knight, and Merry Clayton all cut their teeth in the choir loft.”
The real crime is that that background singers weren’t credited as songwriters, arrangers and producers:
…background singers were writers and arrangers, developing their parts-often, right on the spot. Blossom Fanita James recalled, “If [the producer] had [written] parts, we’d take them. If not, we would just figure something out real quick.”1 Background vocalists did not receive songwriting credit for the work they did to “figure something out,” even though they were often involved in creating parts that helped bring songs together. Producers at the time relied on the ability of background vocalists to fulfill a number of creative roles and to do so under time constraints. The tendency to naturalize black women’s ability to sing may be part of the reason that the thought, planning, and labor involved in their singing recedes.
Labelle
Talk about “disruptors”. Labelle–Nona Hendryx, Patti LaBelle, and Sarah Dash–were it! Maureen writes:
LaBelle, Hendryx, and Dash were making music at a time when fascination with the gospel-inspired vocal sound of African American women led a broad cross section of rock artists to include black women vocalists on their recordings as background singers. Labelle took this process to a logical, if outer stage. The shift marked a return to the early sixties, when black women unexpected, conclusion by bringing black women’s voices and perspectives were at the center of girl group music. But Labelle, veterans of the girl group movement, made conceptual, musical, and business decisions that ensured a level of autonomy that they had been denied when they performed as Patti LaBelle and the Bluebelles. Refusing to be hemmed in by dominant expectations for African American women’s musical performance, the women rejected the roles of either producer-reliant girl group artists or background vocal helpmates for rock bands that characterized black women’s professional options in the recording industry in the 1960s and 1970s. Instead, Labelle created an artistic agenda organized around self-determination and self-expression. As feminist historian Alice Echols has observed, “Labelle was about nothing less than claiming the same privileged turf-the creative freedom, individuality, sexual forthrightness, and right of reinvention-so effortlessly occupied by male rockers.” The response to Labelle’s genre-blending musical sound and explosive performance style, chronicled and analyzed in the press the group received, reveals how entrenched the race, gender, and genre codes were in the field of rock, and how audacious the women of Labelle were in disrupting them.
Betty Davis
Betty Davis ended up being largely erased from rock’s history because her work and performance fell way outside the boundaries of what was considered “acceptable” for women in music.
Davis’s creative vision carried her outside the boundaries of proper black and proper female self-presentation and beyond mainstream comfort zones. Indeed, it is telling that she made these comments and received favorable coverage in High Society, a pornographic magazine that featured photographs of nude women alongside articles about sex and popular culture. (Davis was stylishly and fully dressed in the photos accompanying the article.) Davis was an innovative woman, but her characterization of her performance practices as being “like a man” and not really “like a woman” reveals just how deeply entrenched notions of gender-appropriate behavior are, even for the individuals who consciously work to challenge them.
Brown University scholar Tricia Rose explains further:
In a comment that helps explain the audience responses that Davis describes and that speaks to the radical quality of her performance, feminist historian and cultural critic Tricia Rose notes that black women’s sexual agency “displaces masculine privilege-black, white, and beyond-drawing energy away from a male-empowered sexual space toward a female centered and empowered one.” This could be the reason that some men walked out of her shows. Rose goes on to delineate an additional challenge that the centering of black women’s sexual subjectivity presents: it “de-objectifies black female sexuality without repressing it, which, again, troubles the entrenched notion “that explicit female desire is itself vulgar.”
Tina Turner
Tina Turner, arguably rock ‘n’ roll’s queen, found early success during her time with her husband Ike Turner by doing covers of rock songs:
Recording these songs enabled Turner to traverse the race, gender, and genre boundaries that were increasingly barring African American women from rock. She also played with the representations of masculinity animating songs like “Honky Tonk Women” and “Whole Lotta Love,” putting a black woman’s spin on these “randy affirmations of male sexual identity.” Turner appropriated the sexual autonomy these songs articulated for her own purposes and connected herself to the rock ethos of self-expression. Commenting on the Revue’s turn to rock covers in 1971, Tina noted, “We give the people a little bit of us and a little bit of what they hear on the radio every day.” The resulting mix-rock hits done Ike and Tina Turner style-facilitated the Turners’ crossover to the rock audience as they directly engaged the sonic priorities of the scene.
When it was time for Turner’s “comeback”, she and her manager Roger Davies were well aware of the ways race, gender and genre operated in the music industry and were successfully able to navigate them as she aimed for the rock space:
The overwhelming presence of white artists and fans muted rock’s black roots and the innovations of black artists that were essential to its development. Turner was able to traverse the race, gender, and genre boundaries that stymied other black women, in part because of her professional associations with white male rockers who authorized her presence in their scene.
Further, Maureen notes:
Turner was not the only African American woman to work with white management, producers, songwriters, and musicians. What makes her trajectory notable beyond the high level of success she achieved is the high profile of the rock luminaries who helped her stage her comeback. A story she recounts in her autobiography about staying up late with Keith Richards and David Bowie in New York’s Plaza Hotel, drinking champagne and listening to old R&B records after one of her concerts at the Ritz, signals her insider status.
Noting Turner’s collaborations with white male rockers such as Bowie, Eric Clapton, Bryan Adams and Rod Stewart:
Intended to sell records while giving mutually adoring artists an opportunity to work together, these productions were also exchanges of symbolic capital. Turner’s presence conferred on her white collaborators a measure of African American musical authenticity, while each performance added to her rock bona fides.
Brittany Howard
Turner was clearly an inspiration and role model for The Alabama Shakes’ Brittany Howard:
“I love singers like Tina Turner,” Howard told Spin magazine. “She taught me that you don’t have to be worried about sounding pretty.”25 This refusal to conform to proper femininity is part of what aligns both Turner and Howard with rock; beyond this commonality, both women fashioned clear sonic and symbolic connections to rock. In the case of Howard, the guitar-centric arrangements of her band’s songs and musical references to the pantheon of black and white rock musicians who preceded her establish her rock credentials.
Finally, Maureen notes this regarding Howard’s commitment to rock:
Howard’s race, gender performance, and vocal sound may be ambiguous, but her commitment to rock is clear, even overstated in Thunderbitch song titles like “Wild Child” and “I Just Wanna Rock ‘n’Roll.” Her membership in a band with three white men further indexes her affinity with rock. As with the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Love, Sly and the Family Stone, and Prince and the Revolution, participation in an integrated band can facilitate the crossover of African-descent musicians to white audiences by telegraphing an attitude of racial inclusiveness. Howard’s success as a rock musician comes, as it did with Turner, through a self-conscious insistence on expanding ideas of the kinds of musical and vocal sounds a woman of African descent could engage and whom she could collaborate with to create them.
Important links:
- More information on Maureen Mahon
- Buy Black Diamond Queens via Bookshop
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