Author of Liner Notes for the Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2021), winner of 11 book awards and prizes for excellence in criticism, cultural history, music history, performance studies and more...
2023 Library of American Broadcasting Foundation Broadcast Historian Award for Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound (Harvard UP, 2021)
2022 Music in American Culture Award from the American Musicological Society for Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound (Harvard UP, 2021)
2022 Barnard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research in Theatre History from the American Society for Theater Research (ASTR) for Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound (Harvard UP, 2021)
2022 Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award for Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound (Harvard UP, 2021)
2022 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award for Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound (Harvard UP, 2021)
2022 ATHE (Association for Theatre in Higher Education) Outstanding Book Award (co-winner) for Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound (Harvard UP, 2021)
2022 IASPM Woody Guthrie Award—Outstanding Book Beyond First Monograph
2022 Popular Culture Association’s Shaw and Hazzard-Donald Award for Outstanding Work in African American Popular Culture Studies for Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound (Harvard UP, 2021)
2022 Prose Award from the Association of American Publishers in Music & the Performing Arts for Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound (Harvard UP, 2021)
2021 Museum of African American History (MAAH) Stone Book Award, prize extended to “the finest non-fiction book written in a literary style in the field of African American history and culture” for Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound (Harvard UP, 2021)
2021 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award for Nonfiction for U.S. multicultural writers, to “promote works of excellence by writers of all cultural and racial backgrounds and to educate both the public and the media as to the nature of multicultural work” for Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound (Harvard UP, 2021)
2022 Certificate of Merit—Best Historical Research on General Recording Topics, ARSC Awards for Excellence in Historical Recorded Sound Research
2022 Honorable Mention—Popular Culture Association’s Emily Toth Award for Best Single Work in Women’s Studies
2022 Nominee—Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Award for Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound (Harvard UP, 2021)
Rolling Stone Magazine Best Music Books of 2021 List for Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound (Harvard UP, 2021)
Pitchfork.com Best Music Books of 2021 List for Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound (Harvard UP, 2021)
Kirkus Review Best Nonfiction Books of 2021 List for Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound (Harvard UP, 2021)
Los Angeles Times Book Club: Favorite Literary Escapes of 2021 List
Boston Globe Summer Reading 2021 List for Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound (Harvard UP, 2021)
Daphne A. Brooks brings readers on an epic journey through radical sound from Bessie Smith to Beyoncé and explores more than a century of music archives to examine the critics, collectors, and listeners who have determined perceptions of Black women on stage and in the recording studio. How is it possible, she asks, that iconic artists such as Aretha Franklin and Beyoncé exist simultaneously at the center and on the fringe of the culture industry?
Liner Notes for the Revolution offers a startling new perspective on these acclaimed figures—a perspective informed by the overlooked contributions of other Black women concerned with the work of their musical peers. Zora Neale Hurston appears as a sound archivist and a performer, Lorraine Hansberry as a queer Black feminist critic of modern culture, and Pauline Hopkins as America’s first Black female cultural commentator. Brooks tackles the complicated racial politics of blues music recording, song collecting, and rock and roll criticism. She makes lyrical forays into the blues pioneers Bessie Smith and Mamie Smith, as well as fans who became critics, like the record-label entrepreneur and writer Rosetta Reitz. In the twenty-first century, pop superstar Janelle Monáe’s liner notes are recognized for their innovations, while celebrated singers Cécile McLorin Salvant, Rhiannon Giddens, and Valerie June take their place as cultural historians.
With an innovative perspective on the story of Black women in popular music—and who should rightly tell it—Liner Notes for the Revolution pioneers a long overdue recognition and celebration of Black woman musicians as radical intellectuals.