Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound

by Daphne A. Brooks

Overview

Winner of the Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award, Rock & Roll Hall of Fame
Winner of the American Book Award, Before Columbus Foundation
Winner of the PEN Oakland–Josephine Miles Award
Winner of the MAAH Stone Book Award
A Pitchfork Best Music Book of the Year
A Rolling Stone Best Music Book of the Year
A Boston Globe Summer Read

“Brooks traces all kinds of lines…inviting voices to talk to one another, seeing what different perspectives can offer, opening up new ways of looking and listening.”
—New York Times

“A wide-ranging study of Black female artists, from elders like Bessie Smith and Ethel Waters to Beyoncé and Janelle Monáe…Connecting the sonic worlds of Black female mythmakers and truth-tellers.”
—Rolling Stone

“A gloriously polyphonic book.”
—Margo Jefferson, author of Negroland

How is it possible that iconic artists like Aretha Franklin and Beyoncé can be both at the center and on the fringe of the culture industry? Daphne Brooks explores more than a century of music archives to bring to life the critics, collectors, and listeners who have shaped our perceptions of Black women both on stage and in the recording studio.

Liner Notes for the Revolution offers a startling new perspective, informed by the overlooked contributions of other Black women artists. We discover Zora Neale Hurston as a sound archivist and performer, Lorraine Hansberry as a queer feminist critic of modern culture, and Pauline Hopkins as America’s first Black female cultural commentator. Brooks tackles the complicated racial politics of blues music recording, song collecting, and rock and roll criticism in this long overdue celebration of Black women musicians as radical intellectuals.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674292208
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	02/01/2023
Pages:	608
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.90(d)

About the Author

Daphne A. Brooks is author of Jeff Buckley’s Grace and Bodies in Dissent, winner of the Errol Hill Award for outstanding scholarship in African American performance studies. The William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of African American Studies and Professor of Theater Studies, American Studies, and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University, Brooks has written liner notes to accompany the recordings of Aretha Franklin, Tammi Terrell, and Prince, as well as stories for the New York Times, The Guardian, The Nation, and Pitchfork.

Table of Contents

Author's Note ix

Introduction 1

Side A

1 Toward a Black Feminist Intellectual Tradition in Sound 65

2 "Sister, Can You Line It Out?": Zora Neale Hurston Motes the Sound 125

3 Blues Feminist Lingua Franca: Rosetta Reitz Rewrites the Record 161

4 Thrice Militant Music Criticism: Ellen Willis & Lorraine Hansberry's What Might Be 207

Side B

5 Not Fade Away: Looking After Geeshie & Elvie/L. V. 271

6 "If You Should Lose Me": Of Trunks & Record Shops & Black Girl Ephemera 310

7 "See My Face from the Other Side": Catching Up with Geeshie and L. V. 348

8 "Slow Fade to Black": Black Women Archivists Remix the Sounds 369

Epilogue: Going to the Territory 432

Notes 447

Acknowledgments 561

Credits 567

Index 573

Editorial Reviews

Brooks takes on a wide-ranging study of Black female artists, from elders like Bessie Smith and Ethel Waters to Beyoncé and Janelle Monáe. But she reaches far beyond music, exploring writers like Zora Neale Hurston and Pauline Hopkins…Liner Notes is a secret history in the spirit of Greil Marcus, connecting the sonic worlds of Black female mythmakers and truth-tellers.

Rolling Stone - Rob Sheffield

★ 2020-12-09
A spirited study of how Black women musicians and writers have informed each other despite gatekeepers’ neglect and dismissals.

Brooks, a professor of African American Studies at Yale, ranges from early blues icons like Bessie Smith, who created “jams that revel in the complexities—the affective ambiguities—of a Black woman’s inner lifeworld,” through contemporary phenoms like Janelle Monáe and Beyoncé. But it’s not all about the musicians. Women writers on Black music—Zora Neale Hurston, Lorraine Hansberry, blues and jazz historian Rosetta Reitz—are crucial to Brooks, but this book is not strictly about music writing, either. By synthesizing both groups, the author develops an engrossing and provocative secret history of Black artists developing their own modes of history and celebration, exploring “the myriad ways that Black women have labored in and through sonic culture.” Hurston, an anthropologist before she was a celebrated novelist, made the case for blues music as central to American life; Hansberry’s defense of her own work and Black culture in general established a model for future writers; blues duo Geeshie Wiley and Elvie Thomas opened up questions of Black (and perhaps queer) defiance of expectations to this day and how history is often warped by self-declared White keepers of blues history. The supporters for Brooks' thesis aren’t exclusively Black; she writes rhapsodically about music critics Ellen Willis, Greil Marcus, and Reitz, who reissued the work of Black blueswomen. However, the author emphasizes a culture in which “Black women are rarely in control of their own archives, rarely seen as skilled critics or archivists, all too rarely beheld as makers of rare sounds deemed deserving of excavation and long study.” Brooks writes with a scholar’s comprehensiveness, only occasionally overly fussy and digressive; her record-geek’s enthusiasm is explicit, and her book is a powerful corrective.

A sui generis and essential work on Black music culture destined to launch future investigations.

Kirkus Reviews