There was just a growing number of white musicians who were involved in the music. But by the 1960s, and especially by the late 1960s, the audience for the music, and more importantly the artists who were creating the music, had shifted and there were a majority. They were the original rhythm and blues artists, people like Big Mama Thornton and Ruth Brown and Etta James. Part of it is the way the music changed from the period of the 1950s, when African American women were clearly involved in what came to be called rock and roll. Maureen Mahon: I think a number of things happen to make it harder to hear and recognize the contributions of African American women to rock and roll. Jewly Hight: How were the innovations and influence of music-making Black women omitted or erased from the narrative of rock music? Maureen Mahon, a cultural anthropologist on the faculty of New York University, has done the work to fill them in with her important new book, Black Diamond Queens: African American Women and Rock and Roll, and she spoke with WNXP’s Jewly Hight about what some of the artists we admire and play have had to push against. There are countless books about Bob Dylan and the Beatles, but the thoroughly white and decidedly male-centric “official” history of rock, as narrated by generations of critics and the selections of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, has sizable holes on it.
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