"Tryin' Times: Black Women, Soul, and Narratives of Resistance in the Age of Black Power"

Nina Simone, Aretha Franklin, Mavis Staples, and Roberta Flack emerged in the late 1960s as voices that used musical performances to mediated audiences through one of America’s most chaotic and violent periods.  Songs such as Aretha Franklin’s covers of “Respect” and “Bridge Over Troubled Waters,” as well as The Staple Singers’ “I’ll Take You There” served as the intermediary between the warring political ideologies of non-violence, Black Nationalism and black militancy.  They also channeled the pain generated by the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy, the destruction of urban cities through racial uprisings as well as the violence associated with the Anti-war Movement (e.g. Kent State, Jackson State). Music scholarship from this period has privileged the voices of black male musicians, most notably James Brown and Sly Stone, as examples of how these events shaped the lyrical context of late sixties/early seventies black popular music.  This presentation argues that the privileging of black male musicians has narrowed our sonic awareness of how blackness and the themes of resistance and transcendence were framed in popular music during this period.   Brown and Stone situated their expressions of sonic blackness in the genre of funk, which was scripted as “masculine,” “transgressive” and “black.” However, Simone, Franklin, Flack and Staples advanced a different type of sonic blackness that was a synthesis of black sacred music, jazz and blues. It too was transgressive in sound and at times antithetical to public use of the term “soul.” This presentation explores how these musicians interweaved ideologies associated with the Civil Rights campaigns of the 1960s (e.g. equality, self-empowerment, Black Nationalism) with the experiences of black women in America to expand the musical and sociological context of black popular music.