Black Resonance: Iconic Women Singers and African American Literature

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Acknowledgments
Introduction: Black Resonance
1. Vivid Lyricism: Richard Wright and Bessie Smith's Blues
2. The Timbre of Sincerity: Mahalia Jackson's Gospel Sound and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man
3. Understatement: James Baldwin, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday
4. Haunting: Gayl Jones's Corregidora and Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit"
5. Signature Voices: Nikki Giovanni, Aretha Franklin, and the Black Arts Movement
Epilogue: "At Last": Etta James, Poetry, Hip Hop
Notes
Index

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About

Ever since Bessie Smith’s powerful voice conspired with the “race records” industry to make her a star in the 1920s, African American writers have memorialized the sounds and theorized the politics of black women’s singing. In Black Resonance, Emily J. Lordi analyzes writings by Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Gayl Jones, and Nikki Giovanni that engage such iconic singers as Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Mahalia Jackson, and Aretha Franklin.

Focusing on two generations of artists from the 1920s to the 1970s, Black Resonance reveals a musical-literary tradition in which singers and writers, faced with similar challenges and harboring similar aims, developed comparable expressive techniques. Drawing together such seemingly disparate works as Bessie Smith’s blues and Richard Wright’s neglected film of Native Son, Mahalia Jackson’s gospel music and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, each chapter pairs one writer with one singer to crystallize the artistic practice they share: lyricism, sincerity, understatement, haunting, and the creation of a signature voice. In the process, Lordi demonstrates that popular female singers are not passive muses with raw, natural, or ineffable talent. Rather, they are experimental artists who innovate black expressive possibilities right alongside their literary peers.

The first study of black music and literature to centralize the music of black women, Black Resonance offers new ways of reading and hearing some of the twentieth century’s most beloved and challenging voices.

Reviews

Lordi explodes assumptions about the relationship between black writers and black musicians. By blending insightful cultural history, magnificent close readings, and superb archival research, she refines recent scholarship that reevaluates civil rights era African American literature, the Black Arts Movement, and 21st-century poetry. Her argument's elegant intertwining of cutting-edge theory, enrapturing descriptions of vocal practice, and clear commentary on literature reminds readers of how much rigorous interdisciplinary inquiry can explain about black creativity. Highly recommended

The Journal of American Culture

Black Resonance is a gem ... The book takes us to school, leaving us with insights and skills, pushing readers and writers, singers and dreamers to think about the ways we engage the literary and sonic works of the next generation of black artists and writers

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