Black Diamond Queens: African American Women and Rock and Roll, by Maureen Mahon

Over the past two decades, cultural anthropologist Maureen Mahon’s scholarship has been instrumental in challenging the dominant white-male framing of rock music history.¹ While mainstream textbooks and scholarship now commonly recognize the contributions of Black male instrumentalists like Chuck Berry and Jimi Hendrix, discussions of Blackness in rock music often overlook the important contributions of African American women. In Black Diamond Queens, Mahon masterfully examines the well-explored history of rock and reveals how the creative labor, aesthetics, and identity politics of Black women vocalists are integral to the genre. Drawing from a wealth of archival and ethnographic sources, she centers the critical and creative voices of several Black Diamond Queens who “went their own way, doing their best to sustain careers in a professional entertainment industry that relied on their creative labor and musical contributions, but displaced them and rewarded others who took on key elements of their...