Brooks — Liner Notes for the Revolution

Author: Daphne A. Brooks
Title: Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound
Year: 2021
Type: Academic book (Harvard University Press)

Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound is a book by the Yale scholar of African American studies Daphne A. Brooks, published by Harvard University Press in 2021. It argues that Black women musicians are the creators of modern popular music, and that Black women, among them musicologists, playwrights and journalists, have also been the music’s critics, in work that she writes generations of critics left undertheorized. Its evidence is a series of case studies of performers, writers and collectors, from the novelist Pauline Hopkins, Zora Neale Hurston and Abbey Lincoln to the blues guitarists Geeshie and L. V. and twenty-first-century musicians such as Rhiannon Giddens and Cécile McLorin Salvant. The book won nearly a dozen prizes, among them the American Musicological Society’s Music in American Culture Award and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award, and Keisha Bell-Kovacs, reviewing it in MUSICultures, called it required reading for anyone interested in a feminist reading of Black American music history.

Brooks, a professor of African American studies and music at Yale, published the book with Harvard University Press in 2021.¹ She argues that Black women musicians are the creators of modern popular music, and she extends music criticism to include women musicologists, playwrights and journalists whose work, she writes, has been “perpetually undertheorized” by generations of critics for much of the last hundred years.² She locates the archive in the performances and recordings of Black women, which she calls “repositories of the past,” and she defines Black feminist sound as “musical experimentalism and invention that produces daring and lyrical expressions of Blackness and womanhood.”² In Bell-Kovacs’s summary, that sound includes both the musicians who make it and the people who think and write about it.² Jennifer Szalai, reviewing the book in the New York Times, summarized Brooks’s argument that taste-making has often enshrined a canon that skews white and male. Szalai added that Brooks stresses canon-building and does some taste-making of her own, and that Brooks rejects the assumption in rock criticism that market success comes at the expense of authenticity.³

The book is arranged as the two sides of a record. The first chapter of Side A traces Black feminist music criticism from a scene in Hopkins’s novel Of One Blood through Mary Lou Williams’s histories of jazz and Lincoln’s writing and lectures to Janelle Monáe.⁴ The next three chapters cover Hurston’s collecting of Black folk songs, the feminist critic and record-label founder Rosetta Reitz’s work on the early blueswomen, and the possible influence of the playwright Lorraine Hansberry on the rock critic Ellen Willis, who interviewed Hansberry for Mademoiselle in 1960.⁴ Side B follows Geeshie and L. V., blues guitarists who recorded for Paramount, into the world of the record collectors, often white men, who sought out their records, and it treats Black women, Brooks’s mother among them, as collectors and archivists themselves.⁴ The final chapter describes what Brooks calls a “curatorial turn” among present-day musicians, among them Geri Allen, Giddens, Salvant and Julia Bullock, who keep the work of earlier Black women performers in their own repertoires.⁴

The book has won nearly a dozen prizes. The American Musicological Society gave it the Music in American Culture Award, and the Society called it a “lushly written, expansive tome” that centers the lives and art of Black women musicians and critics. Its other prizes include the PROSE Award in music and the performing arts, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award, an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation, and the Museum of African American History’s Stone Book Award.⁵ Keisha Bell-Kovacs, reviewing it in MUSICultures in 2022, called it “mandatory for anyone interested in a feminist reading of Black American Music history.”⁶

Key contributions

• Black women musicians as the creators of modern popular music, and Black women as its critics, in work left undertheorized for much of the last hundred years.
• An archive located in the performances and recordings of Black women.
• Black feminist sound as a category that includes both the musicians who make it and the people who think and write about it.
• The “curatorial turn”: present-day musicians who carry the repertoire of earlier Black women performers into their own work.

See also

• The color line in pop — the color line as industry infrastructure, from market categories to radio formats
• Authenticity and its discontents — the debate over authenticity in popular music
• Pop as craft — the debate over pop as a craft