"Blues Mamas and Broadway Belters examines racialized embodied singing techniques and their transmission, dwelling with the ways that black women singers theorized the voice in US musical theater performances from 1900 to 1970. Approaching voice from a performance studies perspective, Masi Asare sketches biographies of singers such as Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Ethel Waters, Lena Horne, Eartha Kitt, and others, focusing on the different types of training each performer received. Asare draws on her own experience as a composer, lyricist, playwright, and voice teacher to engage readers in a comprehensive singing lesson and practice of listening, offering analysis of vocal performances, critical theorization of voice pedagogy, and a series of creative voice exercises. As a black feminist voice study, Blues Mamas and Broadway Belters serves as a project to write black women and racially marginalized groups into the history of Broadway and musical theater"--
Scholar, songwriter, and dramatist Masi Asare explores the singing practice of Black women singers in US musical theatre between 1900 and 1970, showing how singers such as Bessie Smith, Ethel Waters, and Lena Horne possessed highly trained voices who fell in a lineage of singers and teachers.
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 practicehow the sound of the teachers voice lives on in the students 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 themtaking 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.
