Good Booty

by Ann Powers

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  When you finally finish the book you’ve wanted to write for most of your life, it’s difficult to know how to begin thanking people. A music writer’s career is one of constant dialogue: with the songs and sounds that make what you do possible, the people who play that music and help bring it to audiences, and the fellow writers who tease out its meanings, share its stories, obsess about its details. If you’ve crossed my path within this glorious, noisy, body-rocking art world, you’ve probably left a mark on this manuscript.

  Specifically, however . . .

  Any set of acknowledgments has to begin with Eric Weisbard. I would not be the writer I am today without him. He is my partner in all things, a brilliant mind, and a wonderfully supportive human being. Endless gratitude, Eric, for seeing me through six years of turning a vague dream into a viable manuscript; for serving as my in-house editor; and for being an award-winning dad and husband. I can’t wait to read your next book. Deep thanks also to my daughter, Bebe Weisbard, for her patience during all the late nights, research trips, and other book-related interruptions in our family life. Your hugs sustained me many times when I was at the end of my rope. Over the past six years, you’ve become an amazing young woman, not to mention a punk rock star. I can’t wait to hear what you play next.

  There’s one other person without whom Good Booty would not exist, and that’s my agent, Sarah Lazin. Sarah had the patience of Job as I spent a decade mulling over how to even approach this book’s subject, and she unwaveringly fought for my vision through its arduous and sometimes unclear path to publication. I couldn’t have had a better advocate. Thanks, too, to Sarah’s colleagues, Manuela Jessel, Amelia Bienstock, and Julia Conrad, for their contributions to the health of the manuscript.

  Denise Oswald is an unfailingly calm, insightful editor who believed in this project from the first time she heard about it, and I’m so happy she’s shepherding it into existence. I’m also honored to have the support of publisher Lynn Grady and the rest of the Dey Street Books team. Encouragement was provided along the way by Dominick V. Anfuso, Jonathan Karp, Nan Graham, Brant Rumble, and Kathy Belden. I’m thankful for Patty Romanowski Bashe for her copyediting skills, Amanda Wicks for help in securing permissions, and Corinne Cummings for fact checking above and beyond the call of duty. Jessi Zazu created the cover of my dreams, as well as illustrations that truly capture the spirit of the good booty. She is a remarkable person and a consistent inspiration.

  I have the best day job in the world, and my colleagues at NPR have been more patient and understanding than I could have hoped. Deep gratitude to Anya Grundmann, Jessica Goldstein, and the whole NPR Music team, to my former colleagues Frannie Kelley and Saidah Blount, and especially to editor supreme Jacob Ganz. Thanks also to my dear friends in the many cities I’ve called home, especially Nick Popovich, Nora Carria, Greg Powers, Victoria Burwell and Carl Zytowski, Josh Goldfein and Yvonne Brown, Jill Sternheimer, Rebecca and Josh Rothman, Margaret Peacock and D. Jay Cervino, Jamie and Stefanie Livers, Loretta and Christopher Lynn, Shelly and Marianne Rosenzweig, Olivia Scibelli, Tim Higgins, and Aaron Head. Jenny Toomey gave me a place to stay on a crucial archival visit to New York. Love always to the Weisbard and Powers families, especially to Nate and Wendy Weisbard for constant support.

  The idea of this book had been percolating for a while when I grabbed lunch one day with Josh Kun in downtown Los Angeles, but he was the first to enthusiastically encourage me to pursue it. Not long after that, Lauren Onkey invited me to give the first Jane Scott Memorial Lecture at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and the project was off and running. Josh and Lauren are part of my beloved community of music writers, scholars, and nerds, too many to list in total here. Some whose insights have helped me the most, in conversation and through their work, are Jody Rosen, Gayle Wald, Carl Wilson, Sonnet Retman, Alex Ross, Holly George-Warren, Elijah Wald, Daphne Carr, Jason King, Jewly Hight, Oliver Wang, Lucy O’Brien, Joan Morgan, Jayna Brown, Tavia Nyong’o, Nelson George, Greg Tate, Richard Goldstein, and Vince Aletti. I want to give a particularly strong shout-out to a few writers who have broken the ground I travel in this book: Evelyn McDonnell, Daphne Brooks, Alice Echols, Simon Reynolds, and Joy Press, and the late Ellen Willis. I am indebted to many experts who helped me traverse a wide range of material. Anthony Heilbut was exceedingly generous in sharing his extensive knowledge of gospel music. Dwight Cammeron was exceedingly generous in sharing the working material for his outstanding documentary on Dorothy Love Coates. Steve Propes offered valued information on the early years of doo-wop. Andy Zax located a pristine copy of the Mom’s Apple Pie album cover. Jim Farber helped me see the connections between glam rock and gay coming of age. Rey Roldan pointed me toward some key Britney Spears material. I thank Curtis Bonney and Michael Udesky for helping me to see the humor in Jim Morrison.

  I hope everyone reads this book, an inspiration: The Spirituals and the Blues, by James T. Cone.

  Archives are essential in preserving the history of American music, and I’ve been lucky enough to dig into some of the best. Thanks to Bruce Raeburn at Tulane University’s Hogan Jazz Archive; Andy Leach, Jennie Thomas, and Anastasia Karel at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Library and Archives; Paul Friedman at the New York Public Library; the entire staff of the Music Division at Lincoln Center; Sharon M. Howard and the staff of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; Jessica Lacher-Feldman and the staff at the W. S. Hoole Division of Special Collections at Gorgas Library, the University of Alabama; Steven Weiss at the Southern Folklife Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Lucinda Cockrell and the staff of the Center for Popular Music at Middle Tennessee State University; and Aisha M. Johnson, who guided me through the remarkable special collections at Fisk University. I also found material online through the Louisiana Digital Library, Rock’s Backpages, and the New York Public Library’s AIDS/HIV Collections.

  Writing an archivally based book like this one can be a very lonely project. I’m very thankful that occasionally people brought me into the world to present some of the work as it took form. Those people include Terry Stewart at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame; Kathryn Metz and the Popular Music Section of the Society for Ethnomusicology; Greil Marcus at the New School for Social Research; the graduate students of UNC Chapel Hill, who brought me to speak at the Carolina Symposia in Music and Culture; Daniel Goldmark at Case Western Reserve University; Lisa Cockrell at the Festival of Faith and Music in Grand Rapids; Daphne Brooks at Yale; and the many members of the program committee at the annual Pop Conference. That conference is my home away from home, intellectually and spiritually, and I have presented much material from the book there. Thanks also to Jasen Emmons for being the Pop Con’s champion in Seattle, and to the staff of EMP (now the Museum of Popular Culture) for herding music-critic cats every year.

  To my dear friends Robert Christgau and Carola Dibbell—I hope I did you proud. Thanks for decades of love and dining-room-table talk. I dedicate this project to you. And to the memory of Prince: I’m blessed to have shared time and space with an artist whose music could teach me everything. May U live 2 see the dawn.

  NOTES

  INTRODUCTION

  1. Eileen Southern, Readings in Black American Music, second edition (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1983), p. 63.

  2. Martin Luther King Jr., “Address at Public Meeting of the Southern Christian Ministers Conference of Mississippi,” Jackson, MS, September 23, 1959.

  3. Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), p. 28.

  CHAPTER 1: THE TABOO BABY

  1. Dancers: Ann Ostendorf, Sounds American: National Identity and the Music Cultures of the Lower Mississippi River Valley, 1800–1860 (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2011), p. 202; bandleaders: Samuel A. Floyd Jr. and Marsha J. Reisser, “Social Dance Music of Black Composers in the Nineteenth Century and the Emergence of Classic Ragtime,” in The Black Perspec
tive in Music, vol. 8, no. 2 (Autumn 1980).

  2. Lyle Saxon, Old Louisiana (Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing Company, paperback edition, 1989), pp. 108–109.

  3. Thomas Ashe, Travels in America (London: Richard Phillips, 1808), pp. 266–67.

  4. Ronald Walters, “The Erotic South: Civilization and Sexuality in American Abolitionism,” American Quarterly 25, no. 2 (May 1973), p. 187.

  5. Tavia Amolo Ochieng Nyong’o, The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009).

  6. Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). For other viewpoints, see Daphne Brooks, Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850–1910 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006); Dale Cockrell, Demons of Disorder: Early Blackface Minstrels and Their World (London: Cambridge University Press, 1997); and W. T. Lhamon, Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000).

  7. New Orleans Daily Picayune, January 22, 1850.

  8. Walters, “The Erotic South,” p. 183.

  9. The classic history of early New Orleans music is Henry A. Kmen, Music in New Orleans: The Formative Years, 1791–1841 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1966). An important recent history is Ned Sublette, The World That Made New Orleans: From Spanish Silver to Congo Square (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books/Chicago Review Press, 2008).

  10. Ostendorf, Sounds American, p. 73.

  11. Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Impressions Respecting New Orleans: Diary and Sketches, 1818–1820 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1951), p. 34.

  12. Marshall and Jean Stearns, Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance (New York: Macmillan, 1968), p. 17.

  13. Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966), p. 27.

  14. Rixford J. Lincoln, Historical New Orleans ‘in Verse’ (1911), p. 10.

  15. Kenneth Aslakson, “The ‘Quadroon-Plaçage’ Myth of Antebellum New Orleans: Anglo-American (Mis)interpretations of a French-Caribbean Phenomenon,” Journal of Social History (2011), pp. 1–26. See also Alecia P. Long, The Great Southern Babylon: Sex, Race, and Respectability in New Orleans, 1865–1920 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005); and Emily Clark, The Strange History of the American Quadroon: Free Women of Color in the Revolutionary Atlantic World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013).

  16. Juretta Jordan Heckscher, “Our National Poetry: The Afro-Chesapeake Inventions of American Dance,” in Julie Malnig, ed., Ballroom, Boogie, Shimmy Sham, Shake: A Social and Popular Dance Reader (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2009), p. 26.

  17. Robert Tallant, The Romantic New Orleanians (New York: Dutton, 1950), p. 109.

  18. George Washington Cable, introduction to Michael Kreyling, The Grandissimes (New York: Penguin, 1988), p. 3.

  19. Kmen, Music in New Orleans, p. 44.

  20. “La Belle Zoraïde,” in The Complete Works of Kate Chopin (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006), p. 303.

  21. James Burton Pond, Eccentricities of Genius: Memories of Famous Men and Women of the Platform and Stage (New York: G. W. Dillingham Company, 1900), p. 231.

  22. Mary Wyman Bryan, “Hitherto Unpublished Songs of New Orleans,” New Orleans Item-Tribune, Magazine section, March 8, 1925, p. 5.

  23. Sybil Kein, “The Use of Louisiana Creole in Southern Literature,” in Sybil Kein, ed., Creole: The History and Legacy of Louisiana’s Free People of Color (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000), p. 260.

  24. Doris Garraway, The Libertine Colony: Creolization in the Early French Caribbean (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).

  25. Deborah Jenson, Beyond Slave Narrative: Politics, Sex, and Manuscripts in the Haitian Revolution (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012), p. 261.

  26. Kein, “The Use of Louisiana Creole in Southern Literature,” p. 123.

  27. Mina Monroe and Kurt Schindler, Bayou Ballads (New York: G. Schirmer, 1921).

  28. Henry Edward Krehbiel, Afro-American Folksongs: A Study in Racial and National Music (New York: G. Schirmer, 1914), p. 151.

  29. Samuel A. Floyd Jr., The Power of Black Music: Interpreting Its History from Africa to the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 156.

  30. Solomon Northrop, Twelve Years a Slave (New York: Miller, Orton & Mulligan, 1855).

  31. Jenson, Beyond Slave Narrative, p. 257.

  32. Edwin C. Hill, Black Soundscapes White Stages: The Meaning of Francophone Sound in the Black Atlantic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), p. 19. For another view of the doudou, see Lachelle Rénee Hannickel, “From Cultural Transgressions to Literary Transformations: Recasting Feminine Archetypes in French Caribbean Women’s Autobiography,” dissertation, University of California, Santa Barbara, 2007.

  33. Derek Scott, From the Erotic to the Demonic: On Critical Musicology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 195.

  34. Vivian Perlis and Libby Van Cleve, Composers’ Voices from Ives to Ellington: An Oral History of American Music (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), p. 384.

  35. George Washington Cable, “The Dance in Place Congo,” Century Magazine, February 1886, pp. 517–31.

  36. E. W. Kemble, A Coon Alphabet (New York: R. H. Russell, 1898).

  37. Ted Widmer, “The Invention of a Memory: Congo Square and African Music in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans,” Revue Française D’études Américaines, vol. 98 (December 2003), pp. 69–78.

  38. Freddi Williams Evans, Congo Square: African Roots in New Orleans (Lafayette: University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press, 2011).

  39. Latrobe, Impressions Respecting New Orleans, p. 49.

  40. Grace King, New Orleans: The Place and the People (New York: Macmillan and Sons, 1895).

  41. “The Dance in Place Congo,” New York Times, March 24, 1918, section 1, p. 19.

  42. Herbert Asbury, The French Quarter: An Informal History of the New Orleans Underworld (New York: Basic Books, 2003), p. 244.

  43. Bryan Wagner, Disturbing the Peace: Black Culture and the Police Power After Slavery (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2010), pp. 58–116.

  CHAPTER 2: THAT DA DA STRAIN: SHIMMYING, SHAKING, SEXOLOGY

  1. Walter H. Ford, The Tryst: An Original Dramatic Sketch in One Act (Washington, DC: Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Library of Congress, 1895).

  2. “Last Week’s Bills,” New York Dramatic Mirror, December 19, 1896.

  3. Steven Seidman, Romantic Longings: Love in America, 1830–1980 (New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 19.

  4. Kurt F. Stone, The Jews of Capitol Hill: A Compendium of Jewish Congressional Members (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2010), p. 138.

  5. Rachel Shteir, Striptease: The Untold History of the Girlie Show (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 43.

  6. For the history of Little Egypt and the advent of the hootchie-kootch, see Donna Carlton, Looking for Little Egypt (Bloomington, IN: International Dance Discovery, 1994); Fahreda Mazar obituary, April 6, 1937, source unknown; Little Egypt clip file, Billy Rose Theater Collection, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

  7. Ray Argyle, Scott Joplin and the Age of Ragtime (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009), p. 107.

  8. Terry Waldo, This Is Ragtime (New York: Da Capo, 1991), p. 4.

  9. Edward A. Berlin, Ragtime: A Musical and Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), p. 69.

  10. Seidman, Romantic Longings, p. 2; Niagara Falls honeymoons: Angus McLaren, Twentieth Century Sexuality: A History (New York: Wiley, 1999), p. 50.

  11. Havelock Ellis, “The Philosophy of Dancing,” Atlantic Monthly, February 1914, pp. 197–206.

  12. Isaac Goldberg, Tin Pan Alley: A Chronicle of the American Popular Music Racket (New York: John Day Co., 1930).

  13. Recorded i
nterview, “The Perry Bradford Story—Pioneer of the Blues,” Folkways Records. Originally released by the Crispus Attucks Record Company, 1957.

  14. Ethel Waters, His Eye Is on the Sparrow (New York: Jove/HBJ, 1978), p. 72.

  15. Susan Glenn, Female Spectacle: The Theatrical Roots of Modern Feminism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), pp. 100–14. For more on the Salome craze, see Daphne Brooks, Bodies in Dissent.

  16. Rebecca A. Bryant, “Shaking Things Up: Popularizing the Shimmy in America,” American Music, vol. 20, no. 2 (Summer 2002), pp. 168–87.

  17. For a lively account of dance music in the jazz age, see Elijah Wald, How The Beatles Destroyed Rock ’n’ Roll: An Alternative History of Popular Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).

  18. Bee Palmer interview, New York Telegram, October 4, 1919.

  19. American Dancer, March–April 1928.

  20. Lewis Erenberg, Steppin’ Out: New York Nightlife and the Transformation of American Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 167.

  21. Gilda Gray, “The Story of Me,” Dance Magazine, August 1928. In Gilda Gray clip file, Jerome Robbins Dance Collection, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

  22. Alice Eis scrapbook, Jerome Robbins Dance Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

  23. Marybeth Hamilton, When I’m Bad, I’m Better: Mae West, Sex, and American Entertainment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 26.

  24. Danielle Robinson, “Performing American: Ragtime Dancing as Participatory Minstrelsy,” Dance Chronicle, vol. 32, issue 1, 2009.

  25. Waters, His Eye Is on the Sparrow, p. 156.

  26. Donald Bogle, Heat Wave: The Life and Career of Ethel Waters (New York: HarperCollins, 2011), p. 54.

  27. Shimmy clip file, Jerome Robbins Dance Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.