Hidden Harmonies

Women and Music in Popular Entertainment

Paula J. Bishop, Kendra Preston Leonard, Paula J. Bishop, Kendra Preston Leonard

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN:
  9781496845375
• eBook ISBN:
  9781496845429
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Contributions by Christina Baade, Candace Bailey, Paula J. Bishop, Maribeth Clark, Brittany Greening, Tammy Kernodle, Kendra Preston Leonard, April L. Prince, Travis D. Stimeling, and Kristen M. Turner

For every star, there are hundreds of less-recognized women who contribute to musical communities, influencing their aesthetics and expanding opportunities available to women. Hidden Harmonies: Women and Music in Popular Entertainment focuses not on those whose names are best known nor most celebrated but on the women who had power in collective or subversive ways hidden from standard histories.

Contributors to Hidden Harmonies reexamine primary sources using feminist and queer methodologies as well as critical race theory in order to overcome previous, biased readings. The scholarship that results from such reexaminations explores topics from songwriters to the music of the civil rights movement and from whistling schools to musical influencers. These wide-ranging essays create a diverse and novel view of women's contribution to music and its production. With intelligence and care, Hidden Harmonies uncovers the fascinating figures behind decades of popular music.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 “She Takes up Music as a Profession”: Women Organists in the Nineteenth-Century South
• Chapter 2 Agnes Woodward’s Whistling School and White Women’s Musical Labor in the United States
• Chapter 3 Women’s Compiled Scores in Early Film Music
• Chapter 4 Listen to the “Poor Girl Story”: (Re)Considering Southern Femininity in Early Old-Time Music
• Chapter 5 Housewives’ Choice? Vera Lynn as Lady DJ in the 1950s and 1960s
• Chapter 6 “A Belly Full of Spaghetti and Ears Full of Song”: Felice Bryant and Country Music Songwriting in the 1950s
• Chapter 7 Goldie and the Gingerbreads: A Case Study of the All-Girl Band in 1960s Rock ’n’ Roll
• Chapter 8 Song and Sentiment in an Appalachian Woman’s Private Lyric Notebook
• Chapter 9 Finding Hidden Women in the Feminist Narrative: Candie Carawan and Music in the Civil Rights Movement
• Chapter 10 Come Go with Me to Freedom Land: Black Women Musicians and the Unexplored Sonic History of the March on Washington
• About the Contributors
• Index