Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound. By Daphne A. Brooks. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021; 608 pp.; illustrations. $39.95 paper, e-book available.

Abstract

If you’re in the know, there’s a kinda secret but incredible curated playlist of over 150 songs that stands as one possible companion soundtrack to the equally marvelous and expansive yet incisive writing in Daphne Brooks’s new book. It leads off with recorded blues pathbreaker Mamie Smith, her showbiz vocals serving the good kind of crazy, and closes out nine hours later with the uncompromisingly glam truth-teller “our Lady of Lemonade” (9). Bessie and Nina and Eartha and Aretha (or ReRe, in Brooks’s preferred sobriquet), Abbey and Billie and Sarah and Dinah shout and croon, melismatize, rasp, and declaim. The sisters with instrumental prowess are also here, Mary Lou swinging jazz “automotivity” (90) on gas-pedal keys, and Sister Rosetta wielding her Gibson Les Paul like a blessed knife beside fellow travelers of the fretboard including the elusive 1930s blues duo Geeshie Wiley and Elvie (L.V.) Thomas. On to the new vanguard whose “fade to black” sounds (369), after visual artist Carrie Mae Weems’s insight into Black women’s potentiality, rise with Rhiannon Giddens, Valerie June, and Cécile McLorin Salvant — artists Brooks follows through reclaimed minstrel song, strains of “Affrilachian” (550) mysticism, and the jazzwoman’s cool regard for the monstrous. This playlist streams online1 as testament to the ongoing shimmer and breathtaking breadth of Black women in popular music, and to Brooks’s arms-in-open-embrace practice of archival engagement. To encounter this text, one must also encounter the music.