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Bessie Smith
Black Broadway
Black church
Black feminism
Black torch singers
black women performers
black women singers
blues
Broadway belting
Broadway musicals
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contemporary commercial music
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creative practice
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Diahann Carroll
Eartha Kitt
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Ethel Merman
Ethel Waters
Gertrude "Ma" Rainey
historical voice pedagogy
Jeannette LoVetri
Jo Estill
Joaquina Kalukango
Juanita Hall
Kurt Weill Foundation for Music
Language_English
Lena Horne
Leslie Uggams
Manuel Garcia II
musical theatre
musical theatre history
nightclub vocalists
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Paradise Square
Pat Suzuki
Pearl Bailey
popular singing
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race and vocal sound
Richard Miller
singing technique
Sissieretta Jones
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sonic citation
Sophie Tucker
Tin Pan Alley
Tony Awards
Trouble in Mind
vocal belting
vocal health
vocal technique
voice
weary-bluesy mammy
Zora Neale Hurston
Product details
- ISBN 9781478030959
- Weight: 431g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 22 Oct 2024
- Publisher: Duke University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
- Language: English
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In Blues Mamas and Broadway Belters, songwriter, scholar, and dramatist Masi Asare explores the singing practice of black women singers in US musical theatre between 1900 and 1970. Asare shows how a vanguard of black women singers including Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, Ethel Waters, Pearl Bailey, Juanita Hall, Lena Horne, Eartha Kitt, Diahann Carroll, and Leslie Uggams created a lineage of highly trained and effective voice teachers whose sound and vocal techniques continue to be heard today. Challenging pervasive narratives that these and other black women possessed “untrained” voices, Asare theorizes singing as a form of sonic citational practice-how the sound of the teacher’s voice lives on in the student’s singing. From vaudeville-blues shouters, black torch singers, and character actresses to nightclub vocalists and Broadway glamour girls, Asare locates black women of the musical stage in the context of historical voice pedagogy. She invites readers not only to study these singers, but to study with them-taking seriously what they and their contemporaries have taught about the voice. Ultimately, Asare speaks to the need to feel and hear the racial history in contemporary musical theatre.
Masi Asare is Assistant Professor of Theatre at Northwestern University and a Tony Award–nominated Broadway songwriter and dramatist.
