Meet the Black women behind rock and roll

A new book dives into the sometimes-unappreciated role of Black women in creating and shaping rock and roll.

The lyrics and sound of the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter” have resonated with rock and roll fans for decades—but its depth may never have been fully realized if not for the prominence of vocalist Merry Clayton on the track.

As a last-minute replacement for a flu-stricken Bonnie Bramlett, Clayton, who’d previously performed with Bobby Darin and Ray Charles, among others, brought “raw power” to the tune, writes Maureen Mahon, an associate professor in New York University’s music department, in Black Diamond Queens: African American Women and Rock and Roll (Duke University Press, 2020).

“Clayton’s voice—its volume and finesse—are riveting, and her vocals broaden the sonic palette,” Mahon, a cultural anthropologist, continues. “Working without a written part and singing what she felt, Clayton brought the intensity of gospel to the track.”

Clayton, who performed at Greenwich Village’s the Bitter End in the early 1970s, is just one of many African American women artists who shaped the genre in ways that haven’t always been recognized by traditional histories of rock and roll. It’s an omission that Mahon aims to correct in her new book.

While origins of the genre, which became popular in the 1950s, are famously complex, critics such as The New Yorker‘s Louis Menand, among other cultural historians, have long acknowledged the influence of Black musicians on icons such as Elvis Presley, who has been both accused of cultural appropriation and celebrated for opening doors for Black artists and songwriters, and even Radiohead, whom Yale’s Daphne A. Brooks called “the Blackest white band” of our times in a recent essay for The Guardian.

“Rock and roll drew on African American musical practices that were rooted in West African aesthetics,” Mahon explains. “When discussing these West African musical roots, ethnomusicologists usually emphasize the conceptual approaches that enslaved Africans brought with them to the New World and that their descendants continued and elaborated.”

But that’s not to say that fans of, say, Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, Pearl Jam, and Joan Jett have always appreciated the intricacies and longevity of this relationship—especially where Black women artists are concerned.

In her account, Mahon chronicles the careers of female African American artists and bands whose names and sounds may be familiar, but whose stories and contributions are less so—such as the Shirelles, whose recording of “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” appeared on movie soundtracks ranging from Dirty Dancing to True Romance, and the Sweet Inspirations, a group featuring Emily “Cissy” Houston—Whitney’s mother and aunt of Dionne Warwick—who joined after its founding.

Despite this fundamental impact, and even collaborations between Black and white artists, the music industry, even to this day, has shown reluctance to promote artists across racial lines, Mahon observes: “From the time that the recording industry began to record and market a critical mass of African American artists in the 1920s, the marketing of popular music has been racially segregated.”

Ahead of this year’s GRAMMY nominations, Mahon digs into several aspects of rock and roll’s racial and cultural history and, in particular, how African American women have played a role as both performers and inspirations:

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