ABSTRACT

Although the prevailing tendency is to associate rock music with White practitioners and audiences, Black women have had a continuous and infl uential presence in the genre since its inception in the 1950s. Attention to their participation challenges some of the fundamental assumptions about rock and African American women’s cultural production. An understanding of the race, gender, and power dynamics of the music industry, particularly the race-based genre defi nitions and the industry’s habitual marginalization of women, is necessary to appreciate the treacherous environment in which Black women were working to advance their creative vision. The tendency has been to view Black women in rock as anomalies, 1 but in this article I treat African American women as an inextricable part of rock and demonstrate that the form as we know it would not exist without them.