THU MAR 03 @ 6-7:30PM | ONLINE via ZOOM

FREE + OPEN TO THE PUBLIC | RSVP FOR LINK

 

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“BLACKFACE BROKEN RECORDS: WHITE WOMEN, ‘BLACK’ SOUNDS & THE RISE OF RADICAL BLUES WOMEN”

“Blackface Broken Records: White Women, ‘Black’ Sounds & the Rise of Radical Blues Women” threads together an exploration of women in blackface minstrelsy, Progressive Era race riots, the classic black women’s blues craze, and the origins of one of the world’s most famous musicals, Gershwin and Heyward’s Porgy and Bess. In particular, it questions the ways that African Americans navigated an early twentieth-century popular culture that policed and restricted their sounds, and it explores the archival opacities that have long obscured the gendered struggle over sonic innovation in the 1910s. This important pre-history of Porgy and Bess exposes its roots which were steeped in a battle waged between women artists — Black and white, in the north and in the south, and on the eve of a blues music revolution.

 

 

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