Kitchen Insurrections: Porgy & Bess, Mamba’s Daughters & the End of an Era/Error

This is a story about modern music-making and Broadway, about “highbrow” and “lowbrow” cultures, opera and jazz, the politics of race, gender, class and the early recording industry. It’s the story of how intimate and joyous artistic collaboration as well as tense, sometimes fractious competition framed the conditions of creative labor forged by Black women theatrical pioneers and music luminaries—Anne Brown, Ethel Waters, Eva Jessye, to name a few—and white auteurs: George Gershwin, DuBose Heyward, Virgil Thomson, Gertrude Stein and others. This talk sets out to reveal how Black women musicians' aesthetic revolutions in 1920s and ‘30s sound and theater culture were artistic obsessions and objects of inquiry in the lifeworlds of white moderns. Their sounds, this talk argues, are the driving force at the heart of Gershwin and Heyward’s landmark opera Porgy and Bess (1935) as well as Heyward’s lesser-known Broadway drama, Mamba’s Daughters (1939).

Daphne A. Brooks is William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of African American Studies, American Studies, Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies, and Music at Yale University. She is author most recently of Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound (Harvard UP 2021). Brooks is the recipient of a 2022-2023 Guggenheim Fellowship. She has written liner notes for recordings of Aretha Franklin, Tammi Terrell, Prince, and Nina Simone, and stories for the New York Times, the Guardian, the Nation, Pitchfork, and other outlets.

Accommodation requests related to a disability or health condition should be made by April 28, 2023 to the Simpson Center, 206.543.3920, schadmin@uw.edu. This lecture will be recorded and added to the Katz Lecture playlist at www.YouTube.com/SimpsonCenter.