Cold Case Files - You Might Also Like: Collected

Episode Date: February 1, 2025

Introducing Episode 1: To Sweat Like Beyoncé from Collected.Follow the show: Collected Episode Notes: How do we understand the work of Beyoncé? While she is one of the most well-known and appreciated Black women in music today, to understand her work, you need to see who came before her and what those women contributed to the story of Black women on stage. In this opening episode of the season, we take a look at the web of Black women in music and introduce the core themes of the season to our listeners, including innovation, labor, impact, and legacy. We also introduce the women profiled over the next four episodes and discuss why they were chosen (and why not others). Find more information at s.si.edu/collected. Guests: Daphne A. Brooks, PhD., is professor of African American Studies and Music at Yale University. Dr. Brooks most recent books is Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound (Harvard University, February 2021). https://afamstudies.yale.edu/people/daphne-brooks  Margo Jefferson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning critic, and a 2022 recipient of the Windham-Campbell Prize for Nonfiction. Her most recent book is Constructing a Nervous System: a memoir (2022). She is a professor of Professor of Professional Practice at Columbia University. https://arts.columbia.edu/profiles/margo-jefferson  Crystal M.  Moten, Ph.D., is a historian who specializes in twentieth century African American Women’s History. In 2023 she published Continually Working: Black Women, Community Intellectualism, and Economic Justice in Postwar Milwaukee. She is the Curator of Collections and Exhibitions at the Obama Presidential Center Museum in Chicago, Illinois and was previously curator at Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History  https://www.crystalmoten.com/  Dwandalyn R. Reece, Ph.D. is curator of Music and Performing Arts at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture and curated the museum’s permanent exhibition, Musical Crossroads, for which she received the Secretary’s Research Prize in 2017.   https://music.si.edu/dr-dwandalyn-reece    Fath Davis Ruffins was a Curator of African American History at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History (NMAH). She began working at the museum in 1981, and between 1988 and 2005, she was the head of the Collection of Advertising History at the NMAH Archives Center. Ruffins was the original project director of Many Voices, One Nation, an exhibition that opened at NMAH in June 2017.  She was leading a museum project on the history and culture of the Low Country region of the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida. https://profiles.si.edu/display/nruffinsf1102006  Craig Seymour is a writer, photographer, and critic who has written about music, particularly Black music for over two decades.  His most recent book is Luther: The Life and Longing of Luther Vandross (HarperCollins, 2004).   https://randbeing.com/ DISCLAIMER: Please note, this is an independent podcast episode not affiliated with, endorsed by, or produced in conjunction with the host podcast feed or any of its media entities. The views and opinions expressed in this episode are solely those of the creators and guests. For any concerns, please reach out to [e-mail].

Have you ever had the urge to sneak behind the cordoned-off areas of a museum? Or roam the halls after closing time? The Smithsonian's flagship podcast, Side Door, will sneak you behind the scenes of the world's largest museum and research complex. Come learn about the ghosts that supposedly walk the museum halls after dark, how a train robbery gave rise to criminal forensics. Why leeches are actually the coolest thing ever. And how to get away with murder in the Arctic.

Maybe. You'll discover stories of history, science, art, and culture you won't find in a display case. You can listen to Side Door wherever you get your podcasts. Or find us online at si.edu. This is Collected, a podcast from Smithsonian's National Museum of American History with support from PRX. I'm Dr. Crystal Klingenberg, curator of music. I had been to see Beyonce's Renaissance Tour

when it came through the DC area, a humid two-night engagement in August of 2023. It was an electrifying evening of music, stagecraft, and black excellence. And when the film version came to theaters, I was keen to relive it. The costumes, the choreography, Beyonce's vocals, the overall vibe of excitement in the audience.

If the film was half the blast of the live show, it was going to be a good time. So I head out to the IMAX with one of my closest girlfriends, ready to fangirl out. Popcorn in hand, we settled in for the almost three hour film. I was completely captivated by not only the close-up view of what Beyoncé put on stage, but also by the way the film incorporated the fans and their expressions of adoration for their diva. We bathed in the rich theater sound and sang along to hits old and new.

Part of Beyoncé's genius is the way she deploys so many different skills— singing, dancing, production, creative direction, charisma—seemingly effortlessly. Another part is that her artistry is supported by Black female geniuses who came before her, and that is shown through her expert curation and historical callbacks in her music. But she's also known to be a very hard worker, and it shows in the polish of what she puts on stage. So as I watched her sing and dance her heart out, an expression of pure perfection and pop domination, I realized that she wasn't really sweating. She had her trademark stage fans blowing around her, but I was surprised she wasn't sweating, save for a little dew around her nose. She was dry as a bone.

She was moving for no less than three hours. And because of the lack of sweat, it looked effortless. Was this by design? If the performer of a generation can't be seen sweating on stage, who can? How perfect does Beyonce have to present herself in order to be the best? If Beyonce is not allowed to sweat, what chance do other Black women have similarly laboring their hearts out? I went into work at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History the next week,

where I'm a curator of music in the Division of Culture and the Arts. And I couldn't shake these questions at the intersection of Black female performance, sweat, perfection, and genius. And reflecting on Renaissance, how Beyonce's work is shot through with historical reference and inspiration. We would see this idea continue to be developed with the 2024 Cowboy Carter album. To understand her genius, you must understand the matrix of women around her, those who came before and those to come after. A lineage of practice, talent, and trailblazing that has consistently redefined the terms of American popular music for the last hundred years.

Women that created that space for Beyoncé and her generation of performers and how their experiences made a way for new and different expressions of Black womanhood on stage for all to see. On this season of Collected, we're taking a close look at the work of Black women in popular music to examine this web of influence, a matrix of connection that offers context for the work of a Beyonce and how the contributions of several women in particular created space for those who would follow. I'm Crystal Klingenberg, and this is Collected, Season 2, The Musical Genius of Black Women.

MUSIC What do you see as the state of black women in music today? You know, if you'd asked me that question one, two, maybe two and a half years ago, I may have had a very different answer than the answer that I would give you right now, Crystal. This is Dr. Daphne Brooks, professor of African American studies at Yale, author of Liner notes for the revolution, the intellectual life of black feminist sound. The answer then would have been with the rise and unprecedented experimental black activists,

black feminist spirit and vision and aesthetics of Beyonce, Knowles-Carter leading the way, you know, amongst a really robust generation of Black women musicians of the 21st century, I would have said that this was the greatest moment in popular music culture for a kind of reckoning of their longstanding impact on not just popular culture but modern life in America. What would I say now in 2024 after a year in which a 30-something white woman, former country singer, so saturated the media that it felt for me as a black feminist thinker who engages in popular music culture day and day and night, it felt like a mass silencing, a kind of cultural amnesia. Though Professor Brooks recognizes

the success and visibility of black woman musicians today, she notes that even the most successful among them still face unfair comparison. During the height of Beyoncé's Renaissance tour, which coincided with singer-songwriter Taylor Swift's Eras tour, there was constant comparison between the two artists. There were countless think pieces and social media posts about the relative merits of Beyoncé versus Taylor Swift.

It got to the point that NPR reported on it in a segment titled, Understanding Why Beyoncé and Taylor Swift Get Compared. Professor Brooks sees an eclipse of Beyonce's rich contributions in the conversation at large. What I'm most interested in in discussions of Taylor Swift versus Beyonce is just the gross iniquity in terms of how they're treated critically and also commercially.

And I think on the critical front, you know, one of the most unfortunate distinctions that marks the two of them is the extent to which one is so often referred to as an artist and the other as an entertainer or performer. Dr. Brooks is describing a common belief among fans and critics alike that the artist is better than the performer, in part because a performer is a worker and an artist is an inspired genius. It's a comparison that is often used to downgrade the labor of certain musicians and strip their output of intellectual rigor.

It's a comparison that robs laboring people of their genius. In short, the artist expresses their creativity, the entertainer labors to delight the crowd. Part of what finds black women's contributions overlooked, whether that be on stage or in other domains of society, is their categorization as workers. In very, very general terms, I would say

that there has always been Black women who have largely been thought of as basically enslaved workers who did the bidding of whoever was the owner or controller of their time. That's Faith Davis-Ruffins, cultural historian and curator for the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History for over 40 years. She takes us back to enslavement to understand this longer history of black women's labor. So in the antebellum period, you don't really have a large diversity of things women can do. I mean, they can work in the field, but they can be seamstresses, and they can be laundresses,

and they can be cooks, and they can be nursemaids. But once you begin to get recorded music specifically, and you get the kind of changes in what we call media in the 20th century, such as film, television, things that don't exist until the 20th century, I think you see a much more complex notions of African-American womanhood that are enacted publicly. After that, they can be doctors or lawyers,

not very many of them, but these possibilities open up. As the diversity of opportunities for black women's labor developed, so did the space for black women to express their talents on stage, and with that, more freedom to create new forms. Late 19th century, people start traveling around in these traveling reviews.

Well, that's kind of new because there were reviews before, often minstrel shows, but most minstrel shows were almost always all men. And when you begin to get the development of these reviews and traveling bands that eventually lead to things like jazz and recorded blues and things like this. ["Sweet Home Alone"] potentially lead to things like jazz and recorded blues and things like this. Ruffins is describing the growing access to self-actualization that Black women had over time.

The stage provided an opportunity to express the things heretofore not possible, but barriers still existed. These barriers included preconceived notions of who Black people were, and omnipresent racial discrimination, including Jim Crow laws. The Minstrel Show, performed primarily by white actors in black face paint and serving up grotesque racial stereotypes to audiences, continued to grow in popularity after the Civil War to become one of the most popular entertainments in the country.

But in the early 1900s, the emergence of jazz and recorded blues created popular genres for black musical expression and self-actualization. But just as music would provide a balm to the soul in times of fear and in times of triumph, it would be deployed as a rally call to resistance, which we would particularly see in soul music during the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s. Rock would get started in the mid 1950s with black artists. Music would also provide the sound of young America through the pop music of Motown from the 1960s to 70s. Disco would arise in the mid 1970s and offer an escape, and R&B would resound throughout. All these genres presented space for black women

to offer their gifts to society at large. In deciding which women to highlight for this season, we had to consider a number of factors. We decided to focus on pop. And as a scholar of popular music, I very much believe in the power of pop to not just move bodies, but to move hearts and minds. So pop it is. But then, which genres to highlight?

Should we pick well-known artists or lesser-known ones? Which time period? What kinds of black female genius do we want our chosen artists to represent? By the time our team put pen to paper, the list was miles long. And when we conducted our interviews, the list got even longer.

I know a lot's been done about her, but I still find her fascinating. It's Nina Simone. Diana Ross. Shaka Khan. I think of India Ari. Samara, absolutely. Celia Cruz. Mahalia Jackson. I think of India Ari. Samara, absolutely. Celia Cruz.

Mahalia Jackson. Abby Lincoln and Alice Coltrane are two women I'd like to know more about. The other one would be Solange. In the end, we decided we needed women that represented the evolution of American popular music not only through genre, but through pivotal moments in time that stood out among their generation as leaders

and innovators in their genre. Women who you might already know something about but not the whole story. And to narrow our focus even more, specifically vocalists, a unique position on stage that we will explore over the season. So who did we pick? If jazz is America's music, who will represent the jazz voice? And if you can't sing it When I think about Ella Fitzgerald, I think about jazz, but I think about her being one of the most influential jazz artists of all time,

not only for the sound of her voice, the range of her voice, her musicality, but then also her influence on other artists. If you recognize that voice, that's my co-host from last season, Dr. Crystal Moten. You will hear her expert takes on labor throughout season two. But returning to our women to focus on, we needed a Black woman who made a name for herself

in a genre that people thought was not for her. Now, when I think about Tina Turner, I think about Tina Turner being the queen of rock. I think about her powerful performances, her athleticism in her dance, her beautiful and stunning physique, and then also her inspirational story of overcoming personal pain and letting that fuel her success. We needed a woman who became an icon in her field, no matter how long the genre lasted. Donna Summer, disco diva,

but also groundbreaking in terms of being one of the first to make disco accessible, to make it mainstream. And finally, someone who created a space, not just in music, but in activism and on the museum floor. I see freedom in the air. Bernice Johnson Reagan, I mean, where can I start? She's a major cultural leader and activist, and she's a preserver of Black music.

Ella Fitzgerald, Tina Turner, Donna Summer, and Bernice Johnson Regan serve as examples of incredible Black female musicians who add meaningfully to the American popular music sound and broke barriers through their performance genius, blazing new paths for the women who would follow them. So how do we get to Beyoncé, a Black woman dominating and pioneering within a musical space? We look at the women who came before her. And while you may know something about our chosen women, we will be looking at the fullness of their lives, stage personas, and particular gifts as we assess the very pathways they

created. We will do this with the help of more experts in the field of music and music criticism, and with the help of their songs, a historical record unto itself. Let's re-route ourselves in the material that these artists gave us and the lessons learned from their journeys, starting first with the voice of the American songbook, Ella Fitzgerald. I would like to thank our guests, Daphne Brooks, Margot Jefferson, Dwandalyn Reese, Faith Davis-Ruffins, Craig Seymour and Crystal Moten for their time.

Check out Collected's website for more information and resources related to black women in music and about the particular work of Ella Fitzgerald, Donna Summer, Tina Turner and Bernice Johnson Regan. Our podcast team consists of Aliyah Yates, Kyra Asibe Bonsu, Frances Ramirez O'Shea, Anne Kananen, and Madhupi Labode. Fact-checking by Natalie Boyd, additional editing by Janaye Morris, and sound mixing by Tariq Fouda. Credits for the music in this episode can be found on our webpage.

Special thanks to Kathleen Felle, Camille Borders, and Jacqueline Hudson. Collect It is funded by the Smithsonian's American Women's History Museum and the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. I'm your host, Crystal Klingenberg. We have lots in store for you this season, so stay tuned. Over here at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, we have some of the most celebrated

people in the world in our spaces, including every American president. You know, he could step out of this painting and glad hand you and talk you out of 10 bucks. But we're about so much more. On the Portraits podcast, the artwork is just the stepping off point. Have you ever wondered, for example, what AI can tell us about our emotional world? Or what's new in copyright law? There was a case several years ago, believe it or not, a copyright case involving a monkey who took a selfie.

No kidding. We tie history to current events. We use portraits to decode the wider world. What we don't understand, we explain to each other. It's what Oppenheimer said as a 10-year-old. I'm Kim Seyette, director of the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery. Look for portraits wherever you get your podcasts. Hit that follow button and we'll do the rest.