![]() ![]() Listen and hear her contribution to the sound, feel, and attitude of rock and roll” (51). ![]() In a chapter about mid-twentieth-century blues legend Big Mama Thornton, she suggests that “If we listen beyond the race, gender, and genre assumptions that inform mainstream presentations of rock and roll history, we can hear what she shared. Mahon expands the narrow boundaries of rock and roll and rock predicated on notions of rock authenticity constructed largely by White men. Black Diamond Queens recognizes the artistic contributions of African American women to rock and roll and examines the reasons it is so difficult to hear their voices in the music they were so much a part of creating” (27). As Mahon states, “This is a project of recovery and inclusion, an effort to highlight a submerged history, and a consideration and critique of the workings of power and genre in the recording industry. And in Mahon’s rich, engrossing, and profoundly important new book Black Diamond Queens: African American Women and Rock and Roll, she shows us that Black women, in particular, played a vital role in the development of 1950s and early 1960s rock and roll, as well as the rock music of the late 1960s and beyond. ![]() Eventually I learned that rock music is Black music. ![]()
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