To Sweat Like Beyoncé

Beyoncé is one of the most well-known and appreciated Black women in music today, but to understand her work, we need to look at who came before her and what those women contributed to the story of Black women on stage. In this special guest episode, curator Krystal Klingenberg introduces a new season of Collected, a podcast from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, all about Black women in music.

Transcript

Guests:

• Daphne A. Brooks, Ph.D. is professor of African American Studies and Music at Yale University. Dr. Brooks most recent books is Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound (Harvard University, February 2021).  
• Margo Jefferson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning critic and a 2022 recipient of the Windham-Campbell Prize for Nonfiction. Her most recent book is Constructing a Nervous System: a memoir (2022). She is a professor of Professional Practice, writing at Columbia University.
• Crystal M. Moten, Ph.D. is a historian who specializes in twentieth century African American Women’s History. In 2023 she published Continually Working: Black Women, Community Intellectualism, and Economic Justice in Postwar Milwaukee. Dr. Moten is the Curator of Collections and Exhibitions at the Obama Presidential Center Museum in Chicago, Illinois and was previously curator at Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.
• Dwandalyn R. Reece, Ph.D. is curator of Music and Performing Arts at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. Dr. Reece curated the museum’s permanent exhibition, Musical Crossroads, for which she received the Secretary’s Research Prize in 2017.
• Fath Davis Ruffins was a Curator of African American History at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. She began working at the museum in 1981, and between 1988 and 2005, was the head of the Collection of Advertising History at the museum's Archives Center. Ruffins was the original project director of Many Voices, One Nation, an exhibition that opened in June 2017. At the time of her death, she was leading a museum project on the history and culture of the Low Country region of the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida.  
• Craig Seymour is a writer, photographer, and critic who has written about music, particularly Black music for over two decades. His most recent book is Luther: The Life and Longing of Luther Vandross (HarperCollins, 2004).

Smithsonian Links: 

• Check out Collected for more information and resources related to Black women in music and about the particular work of Ella Fitzgerald, Donna Summer, Tina Turner, and Bernice Johnson Reagon.
• Take a journey into American musical history and contributions of artists in the Roots to Pop program series, developed in partnership between the Americana Music Foundation and the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, which explores the social history of American music.
• The exhibition Music HerStory: Women and Music of Social Change explores these contributions through unique media collections from the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives, the Center for Folklife and Culture Heritage, and around the Smithsonian.