I'm Christopher Lighten. This is Open Source. We know their songs, not so much what they were

going through, those black women artists who wrote and sang so many anthems of American

life. Bessie Smith's give me a pig foot and Mamie Smith's crazy blues stars beyond category

like Ethel Waters singing Shake That Thing in the 20s and then gospel hits like his

eye is on the sparrow on tour in the 50s with evangelist Billy Graham. Billy Holiday

gave the world strange fruit. Nina Simone went deep with Sinnerman. Earth the kit was

sly and sexy with a French twist on Secy Bonne. Mahalia Jackson sang Duke Elrington's

Spiritual Come Sunday. We're talking about a century of black female singers in the

turn of gender, race, class, region, technology and celebrity that drove the culture and the

music biz. Daphne Brooks is our archivist and our authority, professor of African American

studies at Yale. Liner notes for the revolution is the title of her opinionated compendium

of performances that we all sort of know and there's nothing at all shy Daphne Brooks

about the argument that runs cover to cover through your book subtitled the intellectual

life of black feminist sound. In short, black women singers are our truth tellers you're

saying about love and work, color, cast, God and man and woman. They're absolutely our

truth tellers Chris. I would say they're also our cartographers for how we think about

modern life, how we experience modern life. You know, if we consider the fact that Mamie

Smith was the first African American artist to make a blues recording in 1920, which

absolutely transformed the recording industry. Crazy blues. Crazy blues would be that song.

It was a song that made the blues a black vernacular form, a popular dominant form and it was

the first time that African Americans had actually been able to break through and record their own

music since in the 1910s. It changed everything in terms of how we tap into our everyday

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