Wayne State University Wayne State University Dissertations 1-1-2011 Detroit blues women Michael Duggan Murphy Wayne State University, Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/oa_dissertations Part of the African American Studies Commons, Music Commons, and the United States History Commons Recommended Citation Murphy, Michael Duggan, "Detroit blues women" (2011). Wayne State University Dissertations. Paper 286. This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by DigitalCommons@WayneState. It has been accepted for inclusion in Wayne State University Dissertations by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@WayneState. DETROIT BLUES WOMEN by MICHAEL DUGGAN MURPHY DISSERTATION Submitted to the Graduate School of Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY 2011 MAJOR: HISTORY Approved by: ____________________________________ Advisor Date ____________________________________ ____________________________________ ____________________________________ DEDICATION “Detroit Blues Women” is dedicated to all the women in Detroit who have kept the blues alive, to the many friends, teachers and musicians who have inspired me throughout my life, and especially to the wonderful and amazing family that has kept me alive. Many thanks to Lee, Frank, Tom, Terry, Kim, Allison, Brendan, John, Dianne, Frankie, Tommy, Kathy, Joe, Molly, Tom, Ann, Michael, Dennis, Nancy, Mary, Gerry, Charles, Noranne, Eugene, Maegan, Rebecca, Tim, Debby, Michael Dermot and Angela. ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would first like to thank my advisor and committee chair John J. Bukowczyk for his friendship, his editing skills, and his invaluable guidance through all stages of this dissertation. Throughout my graduate career, Dr. Bukowczyk has been generous mentor with a great deal of insight into the workings of the University and the world at large. I am also grateful to my other committee members, Elizabeth Faue, Laval Todd Duncan and Danielle McGuire for the time and effort they devoted toward bettering “Detroit Blues Women” as it neared completion. The entire committee read my work closely, offered encouragement, and provided a wealth of suggestions that informed and improved “Detroit Blues Women.” As I worked my way through graduate school, other educators and fellow students aided me in ways both tangible and intangible. Albert Agosti and Christopher Johnson are first among those educators. Both of them fostered my interest in academic work and offered thoughtful guidance and direction as I pursued graduate studies. Ken Garner, an extraordinarily intelligent student and teacher has been a good friend ever since we shared intro history courses at Schoolcraft Community College a long, long time ago. I would also like to express my gratitude to several other fellow students who have left indelible impressions on me. These include Joseph Turrini, Richard Fry, Kathryn Beard, Barry Johnson, Goulin Yi, Louis Jones, Timothy O’Neil, David Smith, Glen Styles, Glen Bessemer, and Three Irish Tims named O’Neil, Dwyer and Moran. I would not have come this far without a great deal of help from Wayne State University History Department Chair Marc Kruman, who both employed me, advised me and came to my rescue in the latter years of my graduate studies. I would also like to thank Gayle McCreedy, Kay Stone, Ginnie Corbin and Terri Roberson Patton, the history department administrative iii staff, for assisting me in every step along the way. I will be forever grateful to Ms. Corbin, a kindred spirit in many ways whose understanding and caring helped me go the distance. I also received a good deal of assistance from the staff at the Wayne State Graduate School, the staff at the Burton Historical Collection at the Detroit Public Library, Wayne State librarians, and Brenda Nelson-Strauss and Ronda L. Sewald of the Archives of African American Music and Culture at Indiana University, Bloomington. I would also like to thank Lynn Abbott of the Hogan Jazz Archive at Tulane University in New Orleans for his help and for his encouragement when this project was in its infancy. Yvonne Reineke came into my life just in time and assisted tremendously with the editing of “Detroit Blues Women” and with thoughtful suggestions to improve the dissertation. I am indebted to her for her help in getting me across the finish line. Finally, I would like to thank Kathy Murphy for her encouragement and support and for ‘being there’ for me throughout the years, as well Tom, Terry, and John, the best brothers a brother could have. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Dedication………………………………………………………………………………...............ii Acknowledgments………..………………………………………………………………………iv Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………..1 CHAPTER 1-The Blues Queens, Sippie Wallace, and the Emergence of the Blues in Detroit…11 CHAPTER 2-Alberta Adams and the Heyday of the Detroit Nightclub Scene…………...…….44 CHAPTER 3-Taking the Blues out of the Girl: Motown Records and its Girl Groups Of the 1960s………………….…………………………………………...……....82 CHAPTER 4-Expanding Blues Boundaries: Four Modern Detroit Blues Women—Their Music, Their Spirit, and the City………………………………………..………126 CHAPTER 5-From Street Culture to Manufactured Image: Race, Credibility and the Business of the Blues………….………………………………………………...161 CHAPTER 6-Singing for the Second Time: The Resurgence of Detroit’s Queen of The Blues, 1960-2000…………………………………………………………...180 Conclusion…….………………………………………………….…………………………….200 Bibliography………………………………………………………………………….………...209 Abstract………………………………………………………...................................................222 Autobiographical Statement……………………………………………………………............224 v 1 Introduction “Detroit Blues Women” explores how African American women’s blues survived the twentieth century relatively unscripted by the image-makers of the music industry. Forged in the 1920s, women’s blues carried over into the twenty-first century in spite of the abandonment of the genre in the late 1920s by the country’s major recording labels. Many blues women succeeded in ensuing years despite having to struggle for recognition within a musical field dominated by men –musicians, writers and chroniclers, spectators and business people--who attempted to marginalize or trivialize their work and the work of their 1920s predecessors. While the broad topics of sexuality and gender relations dominate blues music sung by women, they are not the totality of women’s blues, which also embrace a broad range of socio-economic topics. Embellished, revamped, and reinterpreted in the decades that have come and gone since the 1920s, “women’s blues,” which is defined partially as music that harbors and promotes the core notions of individual and collective freedom, has historically provided black women with a space where self-expression is permissible and wherein black culture can be conveyed. Within this musical genre, black women blues singers have claimed independence and a self-directed sexuality that asserts female desires in place of an objectified male-imposed sexuality. In doing so, many of the blues women have shown resistance to some the prescriptive race-, class-, and gender-based notions of “what a [working-class black] woman ought to be and do” that arose in black and white communities and were put forth by men and by women.” 1 This study also seeks to discount notions that the blues queens of the 1920s, or of any era, were, to a large degree, the creation of the music industry, “a product of commercialization,” or 2 novelty items, as is implied by some male blues scholars, such as Paul Oliver and William Barlow.2 They instead developed out of the African American vernacular and musical sources; the most prominent being blues music itself. Although the origins of the blues are uncertain, the music appears to have been a late nineteenth century African America invention that built upon many elements of then popular African American folk music, such as field hollers, work songs, spirituals, ballads, griot songs, and even the “coon songs” of minstrelsy, performed by both men and women. Lyrically, the blues portrayed many aspects of working-class African American life, including love, labor, and loss, and resisted and rebelled against some of the external forces that affected African Americans in the United States, such as race, gender and class oppression. Embodied in much of the blues music was also a yearning from freedom and liberation, which for poor black women required finding relief from the multiple pressures of race, class and gender oppression. One of the first opportunities for working-class African American women to achieve upward mobility and to construct an arena in which their protests and concerns were audible presented itself in the 1920s in the field of entertainment and through the predominantly “white” world of commerce. While the music industry in that era was indeed racist, sexist, exploitative and limiting, and in many senses did “make” the 1920s blues women, “Detroit Blues Women” argues that those African American working-class women, and the black working-class Americans who initially supported them, had a great impact on the music industry. Through their writing and performances, working-class African American women helped shape consumer preferences. Working-class African American audiences, in turn, helped shape the compositions and performances of the blues women and the conduct of the record companies, which in some cases altered