Last Black History Post: Ethel Waters & Zora Neale Hurston

Harvard University Press Blog has On Ethel Waters and Zora Neale Hurston, which includes this paragraph:

Both Ethel Waters and Zora Neale Hurston believed that the Black body, that their own kinesthetic bodies, could serve as prodigious and vital instruments in their musical endeavors. While Waters’s massive breakthrough hit “Shake That Thing” (first performed in 1925 at the Plantation Club) would take the sexual energy of the jook (a realm Hurston refers to as the pinnacle of Black theatricality in her 1934 “Characteristics of Negro Expression” essay) to its ludic extreme, Hurston would also put her body to work not only as a narrative device, an instrument to convey big ideas about the dynamism of Black life, but as a form of performative epistemology called on to reference and revivify the cultural and historical memory of the work song archive. And crucial to this epistemology was an emphasis on the beautifully unpredictable idiosyncrasies manifest in her own voice both caught on tape and loudly leaving its imprint on her own indelible, discursive style. Like Hopkins before her, Hurston pursued the preservation and cultivation of voice—but in this case, it was her own rather than a literary character’s that once again revolutionized Black sound writing as well as the relevance, meaning, and value of recording Black women’s vocality.

I found Zora Neale Hurston in prison and she knocked me over. I know of Ethel Waters. 

You may find the excerpt interesting as it describes the relationship of these two women and how sound affected their work.

Finally, the color line constricts only so long as we whites let it. A better America will intermingle its parts.

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2/24/22