What is made possible when you listen to Black women singers? This is a question that underscores Blues Mamas and Broadway Belters: Black Women, Voice, and the Musical Stage by Masi Asare. Asare traces “[t]he scenario of the singing lesson” (7) and demonstrates what it reveals about the interplay between race and vocal sound through pedagogy, citation, and technique. To this, she offers her concept of sonic citation, the “twice-heard,” following Richard Schechner’s field-defining theory of performance as “twice-behaved behavior” (9). Asare asserts that a song’s “once-againness ensures that, even where singer and listener are one and the same, she nonetheless always also listens in to past singers” (9). With a robust methodological framework spanning theatre and performance studies, sound studies, music and musicology, and Black feminist theory, Asare makes the case for taking seriously Black women’s vocal sound as epistemology.

Urging readers and scholars to listen differently to musical theatre history, Asare begins in Chapter 1 with an exploration of the Broadway belt—or more precisely, the sonic citational history of the belt, with the blues as its antecedent. The first chapter unsettles the belief that this “much-mythologized vocal sound” primarily emerges from a white woman singer (24). Asare’s analysis is rooted in the singing lesson as a site of performance analysis, which itself disrupts the silence of the archive. Listening to performers such as Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Ethel Waters, Asare’s revisionist history is not simply a recovery project of blues women from the footnotes of the musical theatre archive. Rather, it demands a precise attention to the sonic divergences in each performer’s vocal style as well as listening and really hearing the “dirty secret[s] of musical theatre history” that attempt to quiet their voices (43).

Migratory blues notes take readers to the Broadway stage in Chapter 2, where Asare closely listens to Ethel Waters, the bluesy, torchy performer who again makes her appearance as “the weary-bluesy mammy” (15)—Asare’s term for an archetype that Waters embodied, creating an incongruousness between her previous cheeky, comic blues persona and her “encompassing the weariness of the mammy’s laboring body” (75). Asare follows the writings and singings of beloved cultural icon Zora Neale Hurston and her close friendship with Waters, which “speaks to the extent to which Waters was celebrated by black audiences as a legit blues singer even as she moved fluidly across styles” (72). Other performers covered here include Lena Horne, Pearl Bailey, and Juanita Hall, the last of which Asare carefully studies yet evades valorization of the uneasy history of Hall’s portrayal of multiple Asian American characters, despite her Black and Irish heritage. This, too, is an important part of listening to Black women: embracing truths, no matter the discomfort.

Each chapter of Blues Mamas and Broadway Belters seamlessly blends into the others with narrative and theoretical ease. Subjects are not bound to their one chapter; instead, they recur, demonstrating the profound community shaped by the Black women artists under consideration in the book. For instance, Lena Horne shows up once more in the book’s third chapter, this time the focus of Asare’s dive into constructions of “girlish allure” within the cultural conscriptions of American glamour (107). It is here where Asare declares that “this book has been about black girlhood all along” (109), emphasizing that the text traces the practices that many of the performers developed in their youth. Asare applies this thinking to the strategic navigation that Horne employed as a career singer-actress, how she “eludes bodily policing” (112) through vocal performance as a rejoinder to the racist stereotyping to which Black women were consigned. Asare traces this sonic negotiation in Horne’s performance of “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man” and demonstrates the breadth of her analysis through an inclusion of Mary Martin. She comparatively studies how the two performers came up in the Jim Crow era and subsequently reveals how the matrix of oppression (racism, classism, patriarchy) shaped their paths into the professional music theatre industry. Asare’s assiduous analysis extends into her readings of trailblazing Tony Award winners Diahann Carroll and Leslie Uggams, particularly their interconnected yet divergent performances of the ingénue and “how they themselves conceptualized and articulated racial identity in the ways they navigated multiple sets of expectations for their varied audiences” (131). The chapter concludes with a deep dive into the twinned careers of Pat Suzuki and Eartha Kitt and their cosmopolitan, glamorous, and sexy depictions of the “girlish art of yearning” (161).

Perhaps most in service to her declared commitment to Black feminist study is Asare drawing from her own experience as a vocal teacher, lyricist, and composer, which she explores deeper in Chapter 4. In addition to the archival, theoretical, and historical investigations, Asare provides both her own critical and creative insights from her work as a past performer and currently practicing playwright, lyricist, and composer. She also includes observations from her time studying the Estill method, a vocal training program, and applying those lessons to a listening of Abbey Lincoln. Included in the volume are original vocal exercises developed by Asare and inspired by the vocal performances of the subjects in the book. These exercises provide a practical method for engaging the creative labor of Black women’s vocality and once again highlight that artists are theorists.

Think of Blues Mamas and Broadway Belters as the musical score you’ve always wanted but never heard. Though ambitious and dense in its methodological scope, Asare crafts her text in a way that can only be described as dramaturgical, with the fluidity of a well-produced record whose every track fluidly flows into the next. Her interventions in sound studies, theatre and performance history, and popular music unfold throughout the book as Asare convincingly argues for paying attention to the skill and craft of Black women’s vocal performances, the close listening of the specific techniques unique to each performer, and for the disruption of well-worn music and theatre historiographies that essentialize Black musical performance, erase Blackness from pop vocal methods, and fail to attend to the Black women who popularized these sounds—especially on the musical stage. In a world where the phrase “listen to Black women” is callously thrown around, Asare provides a new perspective on what might happen when you do.