Fall 2013
And the Colored Girls Go…:
African American Women Vocalists and the Sound of Race, Gender, and Authenticity in Rock and Roll
A lecture by Maureen Mahon, New York University
Wednesday, December 4, 2013
5:00–6:30 p.m.
CAS 203
725 Commonwealth Avenue
Light reception immediately following talk
This talk will reference the experiences and musical style of African American women such as P. P. Arnold, Ava Cherry, Merry Clayton, Venetta Fields, Gloria Jones, Clydie King, Claudia Lennear, and Doris Troy who brought their gospel-trained voices to hard rock during the late 1960s and 1970s as they recorded and performed in concert with artists such as David Bowie, Joe Cocker, Bob Dylan, Humble Pie, Elton John, Lynryd Skynrd, Pink Floyd, the Rolling Stones, the Small Faces, Steely Dan, T-Rex, and Neil Young. By putting these black background singers into the foreground and exploring the interracial, cross-gender collaborations in which they were engaged, I will demonstrate the ways they helped create the “authentic” sound sought by the white artists with whom they collaborated. This consideration of the sonic presence of African American women in rock highlights the intersection of race, gender, and authenticity in the music of the classic rock era, a context in which romanticized notions of “black sound” and black identity fueled the attraction (among artists and fans) to the sound these women provided. An additional goal is to draw attention to an underacknowledged aspect of black women’s cultural production.
PAST TALKS:
Following the Chornobyl nuclear power plant disaster of April of 1986, late Soviet society began to conceptualize “nature” in radical, different ways. In late Soviet Ukraine, three contemporaneous social movements emerged after Chornobyl: a fledgling environmental activist movement, faith revivals rooted in neo-paganism and nationalism, and a prominent new aesthetic for musical practice labelled as “authentic folklore.” This paper examines the confluence of these three movements in the period following the Chornobyl disaster, positing that the trauma of such nuclear disaster catalyzed and invigorated conceptions of the “natural” that led, in part, to the profound social transformations that came with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Cirque du Soleil produces sold-out performances world-wide on a nightly basis. They are a global circus featuring bodies from almost every continent and many nationalities, and it is universally acknowledged that the nouveau circus troupe’s performers seem to defy gravity and bodily physics in order to do what they do, and audiences pay dearly to stare at their contortions and feats of daring, strength, and flexibility. Musical otherness comingles with bodily otherness in Cirque du Soleil’s intersections with turn-of-the-century side shows and freak shows. From cleaned-up hip hop tracks to countertenors (La Nouba), and Tuvan throat singers to China-pop (Worlds Away), the Cirque delivers a soundtrack worthy of its open acknowledgement of its search for anomalous bodies, advertising specially for performers within “other disciplines” such as dislocation and other “rare and unusual forms of artistic expression.” Cirque du Soleil’s support of emergent artists such as freak show photographer Wayne Schoenfeld will also form part of this talk.
We would like to thank our co-sponsors for this series:
Department of Musicology & Ethnomusicology
BU Arts Initiative, Office of the Provost – www.bu.edu/arts
American & New England Studies Program
Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies Program
Department of Anthropology
If you have any questions, please contact Dan Singer, singerde@bu.edu.
