The Singing Voice

The introduction lays out the key questions, terms, methods, structure, and interdisciplinary concerns of the book. The definitive black musical theatre actress is often thought of in terms of The Wiz (1975) and Dreamgirls (1980), obscuring black women who starred in US musical theatre in prior decades. Similarly, the twenty-first century casting director’s shorthand for a reductive demand of black vocality—"Take me to church!”—disavows ideas of expansion, change, and vocal co-presence for black singers. By contrast, the black feminist study of singing lessons in this book unfolds a theory of song performance as sonic citation, or twice-heard behavior. Sonic citation is not about honoring the memory of black singers. Rather, it is nondiscursive, an invitation to sing in the joyful knowledge of voices one is ever singing along with.

Introduction

2024

Vocal Color in Blue

2024

Examining the influence of the blues shouter’s vocal sound on what became the Broadway belter’s technique, this chapter showcases a line of historical singing lessons, the contexts and moments in which singers taught particular songs to one another and in which vocal technique was also part of what was being transmitted. The reader is invited to listen for lessons in the first three decades of the twentieth century—lessons both acknowledged and disavowed—attended by Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, Sophie Tucker, Ethel Waters, and Ethel Merman. Attuned to the multiplicity of vocal colors in which blues music has been sung, the chapter positions the blues as not only an antecedent of jazz but also, via vocal sound, a vital protogenre of Broadway’s belted-out show tunes.

Beyond the Weary-Bluesy Mammy

2024

By the 1930s, Tin Pan Alley’s diluted blues became the sad torch song of the weary-bluesy mammy, a type Ethel Waters was repeatedly called upon to voice. This character type existed in contrast to the Broadway blues mama persona that Zora Neale Hurston envisioned for Waters, and roles taken up by less-studied Black Broadway divas of the time, Juanita Hall and Pearl Bailey. Hall negotiated a path from the concert stage to the nightclub and, via vocal acts in “high yellowface,” convinced listeners to hear her voice as representative of Vietnam or Chinatown. Bailey also leveraged character roles to maneuver around the vocal type of the weary-bluesy mammy, teaching audiences to, as she put it, “listen better.” Where the book’s initial chapter traced lessons in how and what to sing, this second chapter collects a series of coachings in how to listen around the edges of racialized expectations for voice.