We spend today’s show in a deep exploration of the blues. We’ll explore the racialized, gendered, sexualized, and overarchingly monetized, tension of that music, and its relationship to normative socials and economics of whiteness – and we’ll do that through the lens of one of the legendary creators and original influencers of music that became known as rock and roll. That’s someone who is popularly, although not popularly enough, known as Big Mama Thornton – not famous enough for penning songs that white artists made a killing from, like Elvis’ version of Hound Dog and Janis Joplin’s version of Ball n Chain. We spend the hour discussing a biography that begins by rejecting even the name that she was marketed with. The book is called Why Willie Mae Thornton Matters, and our guest is the author of that book, Lynnée Denise, who is an academic, an author and a global practitioner of sound, language, and Black Atlantic thought, who coined the term “DJ Scholarship”, which shifts the role of the DJ from a party purveyor to an archivist and cultural worker. Her research contends with how iterations of sound system culture construct a living archive and refuge for a Black queer diaspora.
Check out Lynnée Denise‘ website: https://www.djlynneedenise.com/
Buy the book here: https://utpress.utexas.edu/9781477321188/
Our Resistance in Residence Artist this week is poet, poverty scholar, activist, author, organizer, daughter of Dee, and a co-founder of both Poor Poets and homefulness, Lisa Tiny Gray Garcia. Check out Tiny’s website: https://www.lisatinygraygarcia.com/
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