Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature

As conscientious researchers, we utilize existing bibliographies to stake out established knowledge in order to build our scholarship upon a solid, credible foundation; but what if that foundation is hollower than we realize? Our articles and books strive to further previous work and endlessly reach for deeper understanding. However, as I researched archival representations of Black women singer-celebrities navigating power structures in United States entertainment industries in the nineteenth century up to the contemporary moment, I moved beyond the theoretical limitations of the archive (that we obviously cannot hear the voices of singers who were never recorded) into experiencing the material effects of a world comprised of systems that historically reinforced—and arguably still reinforce—racism, sexism, and classism. In turning to literary representations of singers as a way to enrich their archival presence (which can include their own diaries and newspaper accounts of their performances), my research engages writings about Black women performers by Black women authors, who are vastly under-cited because the institutions in which we research are part of those systematic inequalities.

Specifically, this note engages with Jean Fagin Yellin and Cynthia D. Bond's bibliographic entry in The Pen is Ours: A Listing of Writings by and about African-American Women before 1910 with Secondary Bibliography to the Present (1991) on one Black woman singer, Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield.¹ I highlight the racism, sexism, and classism that informs many of the works in the entry and call attention to the Black women's voices missing from the bibliography that, in turn, influence contemporary understandings of Greenfield. Driven by Patricia Hill Collins's assertion that "it is more likely for Black women as members of an oppressed group to have critical insights into the condition of our own oppression than it is for those who live outside those structures," this note brings essential, historically excluded, Black women's writings on Greenfield to bear on Yellin and Bond's bibliography.² In the process, I consider both what is bibliographically and archivally apparent and absent. I turn specifically to two sources whose exclusion from Yellin and Bond's bibliography are not surprising—one is a magazine article and one is a conference paper. However, we know that valuable information can be found in—and when navigating racist, sexist, [End Page 387] and classist institutions, sometimes has to be found in—less "authoritative" homes, like magazines and conference papers that never see the glory of publication in an academic journal or book. Specifically, writer Pauline Hopkins's "Phenomenal Vocalists" (1901) feature in The Colored American Magazine on Greenfield enriches our understanding of what Greenfield sounded like by describing her singing range not in comparison to a white woman contemporary, as in the currently included bibliography texts, but in comparison to her Black women contemporaries and those who came after her.³ Musicologist Georgia A. Ryder's 1975 conference paper "Black Women in Song: Some Socio-Cultural Images" situates Greenfield within a historical trajectory of Black women singers and how their performances challenged racist musicological assumptions about Black talent asserted in the twentieth century.⁴ Indeed, this special volume of Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature focuses on the intersection of archives and women's writing, and this note explores a question Emily Ruth Rutter and Irma McClaurin raise in part one of the volume: what about racially marginalized women who were prevented from or faced undue hindrances in narrating their own experiences?⁵ While scholars have engaged with Greenfield more deeply since Yellin and Bond's bibliography, I bring Hopkins's and Ryder's writing about Greenfield to the bibliography as a site for reading with and against the archival grain.⁶ In other words, this note offers an example of how to approach biographical writing about historical Black women in more capacious, intersectional terms.

Later known by the stage name the "Black Swan," Elizabeth was born into slavery. When she was one year old, her mistress...