Black Women and Music: More Than the Blues

This collection is the first interdisciplinary volume to address black women’s negotiation of race and gender in African American music. Contributors explore ways African American women musicians of the twentieth century have negotiated feminisms, engaged in social activism, and worked within - or sometimes independent of - a male-dominated music industry. Individual essays examine the experiences of black women in classical music and in contemporary blues: the history of black female gospel-inflected voices in the Broadway musical, contemporary electric guitarists in the blues, and hip-hop feminism and its complications. With a focus on black women in previously under-examined contexts, authors introduce readers to the work of a prominent gospel announcer, to performers of women-identified music, and to women affiliated with the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. The authors place black women’s social identities and experiences at the centre of their analyses and establish a theoretical basis for examining black women’s music-making, not only historically, but during the later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.