By Christian Mattos and Hayley Salazar 

During the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, America went through progressive change. For black Americans partaking in the social activism, music was an outlet as well as a means of expression and protest.

Dr. Tammy Kernodle, a professor of musicology at Miami University of Ohio and a specialist in women in jazz, presented a two-part lecture last Thursday and Friday on women and their role as musicians and activists during the fight for social and gender equality of the 1960s.

The lectures are part of the Global Music Series in conjunction with the Center for Creativity and Arts 2017-2018 theme: Voice and Silence: Expressions of Community, Advocacy and the Human Spirit set up by the College of Arts and Humanities.

Kernodle’s first lecture of the series, titled “Trying Times: Black Women, Soul, and Narratives of Resistance in the Age of Black Power,” focused on the music of black women singers used to promote social activism during the Civil Rights Movement.

The narrative of change, in regard to both racial and gender equality, is depicted in the artistry of musicians like Nina Simone, Aretha Franklin, Melba Liston and Mary Osborne, said Kernodle.

“When we look at the idea of resistance culture in America and we look at it within the spectrum of popular music, in the late 1960s, black women artists were at the vanguard,” Kernodle said.  “They operated as the vanguard in terms of defining, promoting and disseminating these particular narratives of protest and resistance.”

In response to the violence of the Civil Rights Movement, vocalist and pianist Nina Simone articulated the pain, shock and anger Americans felt during the late 1950s with songs like “Backlash Blues” and “Mississippi Goddamn,” Kernodle said.

“But Simone also reflects for us how centric black women’s voices had become in expressing what was part of a narrative of resistance or resistance of culture that came to define the Civil Rights Movement,” she said. “She would prophesize in many ways what would become a more militant, angry perspective of civil rights music in the late 1960s.”

Franklin’s debut album for Atlantic Records — “I’ve Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You” — included emotional lyrics that allowed for open interpretation by the audience.

“Feminists heard strong statements advocating for equality and respect, while black listeners heard messages that articulated their growing lack of patience with America,” Kernodle said.

Singer Roberta Flack demonstrated a sound that was more jazz than the sonic blackness of soul, Kernodle said.  Her cover of the folk song “Business as Usual” invokes the perspective of a black woman whose brother went to Vietnam and returned forever changed.

“We don’t get those perspectives of black women’s experiences as mothers and sisters and daughters in popular music until we get to this point in our historiography,” Kernodle said.  “[Flack] moved through these multiple kinds of pronunciations of activism and love and resistance embedded in songs in the midst of them.”

Gospel blues marketed as soul denoted consciousness and blackness, Kernodle said. Singers like Mavis Staples and her family’s musical group, the Staples Singers, had a sonic identity rooted in gospel music.

“Black female artist-activists shaped the narrative of protest music during a period in which America faced significant social challenges,” Kernodle said. “They benefited from layering their albums with songs that dealt with the spectrum of love along with this social-political commentary.”

In her second lecture, titled “Playing From the Margins: Gender, Jazz and Cultural Containment in Cold War Era America,” Kernodle highlighted major shifts in the style of jazz after the late 1940s as women emerged in what was once considered a “masculine space.”  

“What happens with the emergence of these [all-girl] bands is that there is an ideology that is promoted about femininity,” Kernodle said.

Physical and mental restrictions were often placed on these female bands as they were pushed to promote the idea of femininity that their male counterparts did not have to deal with, Kernodle said.

“I want you to imagine being a drummer, and you have to drum in 4-inch stilettos with a dress and girdle,” Kernodle said to the audience. “Or you being a saxophone player and being told that you must take your eye glasses off because everyone must look the same.”

Kernodle said jazz became a terrain in which gender and race were contested on a performing stage, but also in a culture that framed jazz during that period and global political climate.

Groups like the International Sweethearts of Rhythm, a racially integrated, all-female band, were spearheads and an inspiration for the composition of more integrated groups of jazz jam sessions.

“These became spaces where knowledge was transferred,” Kernodle said. “These also became spaces where people’s sound identities and personalities came to be formed.”

Kernodle exhibited the works of Melba Liston, a black, female trombonist who jammed with Dizzy Gillespie, and Mary Osborne, a white, female guitarist who worked with male musicians alike, to showcase the pivotal role women played in the art of jazz.

Women who played brass, woodwind and percussion instruments were seen as distractions or job stealers from male musicians, Kernodle said.

Musicians like Liston and Osborne faced backlash when entering male groups, but their talents in performance and arrangement earned the respect of their male counterparts, she said.

Zena Samuelson, a senior majoring in music education, attended the lecture as part of an assignment for her introduction to world music class.

Samuelson previously took both a history course and an Africana studies course where she first learned about the histories of jazz, bebop and blues.

“So hearing this [lecture], I thought I’d already know all the major figures from jazz and blues, but you’re always going to learn more,” Samuelson said.

What stood out to Samuelson the most was Kernodle’s words during the question and answer session about some of the dangers faced while being “an agent for change” in post-war segregated society.

“It [change] shouldn’t make you afraid,” Samuelson said. “It should just make you more aware, but it’s worth fighting for. Change is worth fighting for. That’s what I took from it.”

Kernodle’s lecture, along with other lectures put on by the college, helps to inform students of things they didn’t know before and encourages them to seek positive social change, said Samuelson.

“It’s good to bring in other academic people so it’s not just Fresno State professors saying we need to be positive change,” Samuelson said. “I play percussion, so it’s funny when listening to the lecture when she was talking about women doing jazz. It was frowned upon if you weren’t a piano player or a singer because I played drumset.”

For Samuelson, being a female in percussion has never been limiting for her.

“People are super supportive. They’d be like, ‘What, you have a girl drummer? That’s so cool,’” she said. “I remember we played for Yosemite National Park and a dad came up to me during one of our set breaks and said his daughter was there, she was 5, and he was so happy that I was playing drums.”