Recording industry executive and popular music historian Arnold Shaw points out that “To Southern white ears, Elvis sounded so black that Phillips had him appear on a local disk jockey show where he identified himself as a student at the local white high school. Instead, he produced a black sound, drawing his predominantly white audiences into a sonic experience whose overt racial mixing was at once enticing and illicit. Presley’s versions of African American rhythm and blues did not erase blackness in the way that the covers recorded by white pop singers such as Pat Boone or Georgia Gibbs did.
Here, Maureen notes Elvis’s debt to Big Mama Thornton: The book also provides examples of how some women were able to compensate for their barriers put in the way (at least to some extent). I love her use of the term “legibility.” In this context, Maureen uses the term to indicate the way that the construction of rock culture, as a space primarily for white, male power and authenticity, made it difficult, if not impossible to see and understand the role that Black women had in shaping rock music and having their contributions recognized. Charting the cultural shifts of the music landscape from the 1950s through to the present day, Maureen highlights the careers and contributions of women who worked as both background singers and those whose careers didn’t quite take off as expected–Merry Clayton, Devon Wilson, Marsha Hunt, Claudia Lennear–as well as some well-known and iconic singers such as Big Mama Thornton, LaVern Baker, The Shirelles, LaBelle, Betty Davis, Tina Turner and Brittany Howard. Her latest book, Black Diamond Queens: African American Women and Rock and Roll, is a powerfully argued, and extremely accessible, exploration of the ways that gender, race and genre obscure and erased Black women’s contributions and achievements in rock music. I’ve been blessed with dope friends, and Maureen Mahon, a cultural anthropologist and associate professor at NYU, is one of them.
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