June is African-American Music Month, intended to celebrate the important contributions of African-American entertainers in the music industry.  Most American popular music is rooted in Black music traditions dating to the founding of the country, a fact not always acknowledged in society, and these traditions range from instrumentation to musical style to vocalization.  This blog highlights a handful of influential African-American musicians whose work is part of American collective social memory.

Gladys Bentley

Openly lesbian and among the first well-known drag king performers in American history, Gladys Bentley (1907-1960) was born in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, and grew up in Philadelphia.  She left home at 16 to perform in jazz clubs in New York, under her own name but dressed in formal men’s attire – a white tuxedo with full tails and a white top hat.  As a performer, her act was punctuated with bawdy parodies of popular tunes as well as the occasional original song, all filled with lyrics that emphasized her identity as a woman who loved women.  in 1930, she married a white woman and lived with her lavishly in a Park Avenue apartment.  She remained in New York through the 1930s, a successful draw for the Clam House and, later, Ubangi’s Club, both gay nightclubs, as well as the famous Apollo Theater in Harlem.  However, with the fall of Prohibition and a change in social acceptance toward LGBTQ entertainers by the early 1940s, she moved to southern California to continue her career.  While there, the nightclub where she worked required a special permit to allow her to wear pants. By the late 1940s and early 1950s, the rise of the Red Scare and McCarthyism, combined with social and political pressure, forced her to publicly renounce her lesbianism, marry a man and dress in feminine clothing.  .  A late video from 1958, her only known surviving live performance, shows Bentley in a dress, playing the piano with the same energy as found on her records.  Her life was complicated and impacted by the anti-lesbian morals of her time, but her influence on both popular music and LGBTQ history remains potent and undeniable.

Bert Williams

“The funniest man I ever saw and the saddest man I ever knew,” said comedian W. C. Fields of the legendary Bert Williams.  Egbert Austin “Bert” Williams (1874-1922) was born in the Bahamas and immigrated to the US as a child.  He started his career on the vaudeville stage in “burnt-cork” or blackface roles.  These roles relied heavily on stereotypes of the day, which were demeaning to people of color.  Yet Williams led the charge to repudiate these stereotypes, creating Broadway musicals that featured more realistic portrayals of African-Americans in their everyday lives and employed some of the finest musicians of the day, including composer Will Marion Cook.  He also came up with one of the most beloved songs in the Great American Songbook.  In 1905, for his musical “Abyssinia”, he wrote and performed “Nobody,” a song about a down-and-out individual who acknowledged the help of “nobody” when he was in trouble. Sales of “Nobody” were unusually large, with between 100,000 and 150,000 copies sold at a time when 25,000 copies sold was considered a bestseller.  Incidentally, the sheet music for “Nobody,” along with many of his other compositions, was published by the Black-owned Attucks Music Company.  In addition to his pioneering work on stage, he also spearheaded what would have been the first film with an all-Black cast.  Originally untitled, the surviving footage has been reconstructed and was released as “Lime Kiln Club Field Day” in 2014.  He performed as a feature member of the Ziegfield Follies from 1911 until his death, from pneumonia, in 1922 at the age of 46. 

Sister Rosetta Tharpe

Rock and roll does not exist without Sister Rosetta Tharpe (1915-1973).  With a background in gospel music, she began as a singer and guitarist on the gospel tent circuit.  By 1938  she found work at the prestigious Cotton Club, a jazz venue in New York, where she was a featured performer for Lucky Millender’s jazz orchestra.  It is her guitar playing, however, that influenced an entire generation of early rock and roll artists.  Her songs combined jazz and rhythm-and-blues syncopations with spiritual verses, a rollicking combination that earned her both ardent fans and opposition from her church.  Her work is also one of the foundations for the form of music known today as gospel, but she also influenced numerous early rock and rollers, including Elvis Presley.  In 1964, she toured the UK and made a stop in Manchester, an industrial city in the north.  Artists such as Eric Clapton claim her performance as an inspiration for their own, making her a significant progenitor of British blues.  In addition, she recorded what was among the first interracial records, a duet with country artist Red Foley, “Have a Little Talk with Jesus.”  Even her personal life was unconventional.  She was married three times to men, but also maintained relationships with women, particularly a longstanding affair with gospel singer Marie Knight.  She was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2018, and her recording of “Down by the Riverside” was added to the National Recording Registry in 2004. 

Popular music is a culmination of musical styles reflecting the past, and it has always been an integrated history, with threads of African-American music weaving throughout.  These trailblazers provided new models for performance, appearance, expressions of sexuality and, most importantly, an expansion of the American musical landscape.  Without them, American music would be significantly less innovative and far less interesting.  Interested in learning more about American music history?  Want to learn more about African-American contributions to popular culture?  Curious about writing or composing music?  Ask us! iueref@iu.edu