“Effortlessly poetic, deeply historical, and insistently imaginative, Liner Notes for the Revolution doesn’t merely give voice to unheeded and crucial innovators; it offers a new method for approaching music history itself.”
— Ann Powers NPR music critic
"A sui generis and essential work on Black music culture destined to launch future investigations."
—Kirkus Starred Review
“This enlightening survey a fresh perspective on more than a century’s worth of Black female musicians…Brooks combines an impressive archive of musical works and the artists’ own words to convincingly reveal how they each impacted popular culture.
Music aficionados should take note.”
—Publisher’s Weekly
“Daphne Brooks has written a gloriously polyphonic book. Moving through the tumult of the twentieth century and the millennium, she scores, archives, and curates the history of Black woman musicians and their radical modernities, all created in a culture that presumed they had no voices or minds. What did they do to be so Black, brilliant, and blue? Listen. And read on.”
—Margo Jefferson, author of the National Book Critics Circle Award–winning Negroland
“For Daphne Brooks, black feminist sound is sensuous thought. In Liner Notes for the Revolution, she feels and shows and says this with such devotion, such critical and emotional intelligence, such archival commitment and dexterity, and such urgent social aspiration that listening itself is new again.”
—Fred Moten, author of All That Beauty
“Liner Notes for the Revolution is a groundbreaking and breathtaking volume from one of our leading cultural historians that will forever change the way we write and think about American culture. Daphne Brooks insists upon the genius of black women music-makers, listeners, and critics. This transformative work of intellectual generosity is sure to join the ranks of classic works such as Amiri Baraka’s Blues People and Greil Marcus’s Lipstick Traces.”
—Farah Jasmine Griffin, author of Harlem Nocturne