Telling It Otherwise: Listening to the Archive of Women Musicians
In her book Listening in Detail: Performances of Cuban Music, Alexandra Vazquez engages critically with interviews and oral histories as sources of knowledge about music and culture. Writing about Cuban artists, she observes that “the theoretical possibilities to be heard from many oral histories--especially those by musicians--are in the creative ways they respond to questions" [emphasis added]. By suggesting that musicians bring skills associated with their sonic creativity--the ability to improvise; to change register; to arrange and rearrange; to amplify or muffle--to oral histories, Vazquez’s observation invites us to consider the polyvocality of their engagement with interviewers and other interlocutors.
In this roundtable PopCon OGs will come together with emerging feminist music scholars to discuss our engagements with, and research strategies regarding, the oral histories of female musicians. Building off of the 2022 conference theme, we are particularly interested in the voices of racialized women and the demands of representation that they (refuse to) bear. We see the interface between oral historians and female musicians as a kind of border: a shifting site of encounter that is subject to ongoing negotiation.
Some of us will discuss our own experiences of conducting oral histories or research projects or public-facing work; others will discuss their engagement with oral history archives; and still others will approach the question of oral history through the gaps and silences of the archive. In each case, we will touch on the complex ethics of our engagement with the “voices” of female musicians as they are mediated by interviews. Can we learn to read/listen to these interviews as we listen to music, or with a musician's ears? How do we engage both the lacunae of the archives and the various strategies of female interviewees as they confront the investments of different interviewers/historians in different times and places? How do the affective and intellectual investments of interviewers matter? How might we think about the “voice” of the musician-interviewee alongside of, or in counterpoint or conflict with, the “voice” (instrumental/vocal) of her music?
Participants:
Daphne Brooks is William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of African American Studies, American Studies, Women’s Gender & Sexuality Studies and Music at Yale University. She is the author of Jeff Buckley’s Grace, Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850-1910 and Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound. She is currently at work on a new book entitled “One of These Mornings’: Porgy & Bess and the Story of America.
Ambre Dromgoole is a doctoral candidate in the Departments of Religious Studies and African American Studies at Yale University. Her dissertation “There’s a Heaven Somewhere’: Itinerancy, Intimacy, and Performance in the Lives of Gospel Blues Women, 1915-1983” positions the friendships, micro-interactions, and collaborations of an intimate circle of Black women gospel musicians (Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Roxie Ann Moore, Ernestine Washington, Marie Knight) as untilled sites worthy of critical Black feminist engagement, sociohistorical consideration, and nuanced religious analysis.
Alexandra T. Vazquez is Associate Professor in the Department of Performance Studies at New York University. She is the author of The Florida Room (Duke 2022) and Listening in Detail: Performances of Cuban Music (Duke 2013). Vazquez’s work has been featured in NPR's "Turning the Tables," American Quarterly, small axe, Social Text, women and performance, the JPMS, and in the edited volumes Keywords in Latina/o Studies, Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas, Reggaeton, and Pop When the World Falls Apart. She is a proud graduate of the New World School of the Arts in Miami, Florida.
Gayle Wald is Professor of American Studies at George Washington University. She is author of 3 books, including Shout, Sister, Shout! (Beacon), a biography of Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and It’s Been Beautiful: Soul! and Black Music Television (Duke UP). Her work has appeared in Feminist Media Studies, American Quarterly, Current Musicology, andWomen and Performance, as well as theOxford American, NPR Music and Public Books. Her current project is This is Rhythm, a biography of the eminent children’s musician Ella Jenkins.
Clara Wilson-Hawken is a 7th-year PhD Candidate in African American and American Studies at Yale University. Her research traces the various forms of musical, affective, and administrative labor through which Black women navigated the U.S. music industry's shifting hierarchies between 1945 and 1985. Each chapter of her dissertation uses a combination of sound recordings and textual archives to analyze the work of Black women who held strategic musical and non-musical positions within the industry--from radio disc jockey to record label executive, talent agent to lead vocalist. Her research is currently being supported by the Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship.
