From Blues to Beyonce

Explores how Black women have continually used sound to convey stories and forge community across generations.

From Blues to Beyonc? amplifies Black women's ongoing public assertions of resistance, agency, and hope across different media from the nineteenth century to today. By examining recordings, music videos, autobiographical writings, and speeches, Alexis McGee explores how figures such as Ida B. Wells, Billie Holiday, Ruth Brown, Queen Latifah, Aretha Franklin, Nina Simone, Janelle Mon?e, and more mobilize sound to challenge antiBlack discourses and extend social justice pedagogies. Building on contemporary Black feminist interventions in sound studies and sonic rhetorics, From Blues to Beyonc? reveals how Black women's sonic acts transmit meaning and knowledge within, between, and across generations.