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Vocal racial crossover in the song performance of three iconic American vocalists: Sophie Tucker (1884--1966), Elsie Janis (1889--1956) and Ella Fitzgerald (1917--1996)
Eden Elizabeth Kainer
Paperback. ProQuest, UMI Dissertation Publishing 2011-09-03.
ISBN 9781243531513
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Publisher description
Vocal-linguistic conventions that date back at least to 19th-century blackface minstrelsy have informed generations of singers and listeners with an ideal of a "black" sound, with an opposing ideal of a "white" sound as a logical corollary. Sophie Tucker (1884-1966) and Elsie Janis (1889-1956) were white performers who relied on those conventions to practice vocal racial crossover on the early Vaudeville stages in their performances of "coon" songs and "Negro" dialect. Ella Fitzgerald (1917-96), an African-American vocalist who did not try to sound white, both reacted to and was affected by a jazz commentary saturated with ideals of "musical blackness" related to these acoustic artifacts. In this dissertation I perform close readings of three important recorded song performances by Tucker, Janis and Fitzgerald to demonstrate that vocal racial crossover is a kinetic interaction among the performer's stylistic choices, the listener's aural experience of the singer's voice, and culturally constructed narratives of race, class and gender. In historical, literary and musicological discussions of female vocalists, there is a privileged ideal of the "grained" female voice that is racially marked, erotically charged, and characterized by vocal strain, discontinuities of the singing voice and other acoustic legacies of blackface minstrelsy. As popular music scholars and listeners we remain committed to notions of racial musical difference, even as we acknowledge the continually shifting nature of race, class and gender identities in "real" life. By juxtaposing the historical examples of Janis and Tucker with that of the more contemporary Fitzgerald, this dissertation proves that reverberations of minstrelsy continue to shape our academic discourse in the developing field of popular music studies, as well as the way we hear race in the voices of popular performers
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Vocal racial crossover in the song performance of three iconic American vocalists: Sophie Tucker
Book reviews » Vocal racial crossover in the song performance of three iconic American vocalists: Sophie Tucker (1884--1966), Elsie Janis (1889--1956) and Ella Fitzgerald (1917--1996)
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