ABSTRACT
DETROIT BLUES WOMEN
by
Michael Duggan Murphy
August 2011
Advisor: Dr. John J. Bukowczyk
Major: History
Degree: Doctor of Philosophy
Detroit Blues Women explores how African American women\u27s blues survived the twentieth century relatively unscripted by the image-makers of the male-dominated music industry. In the 1920s, African American blues queens laid out a foundation for assertive and rebellious women\u27s blues that the many musical heirs who succeeded them in the twentieth century and into the first decade of the twenty first century sustained, preserved and built upon. The dissertation argues that women\u27s blues, which encouraged women to liberate themselves and seek sexual, social and political freedom, survived into the twenty-first century despite facing the formidable obstacles of racism, capitalism and patriarchy.
The story of African American women\u27s blues in the twentieth century relates to two different types of migration, the first being the very physical and concrete Great Migration of 1910 to 1930 that brought blues music and many southern African Americans north. The second migration was the more abstract, aesthetic, transcendent journey that took blues women, and their blues across barriers of race, class and gender. Both of these migrations were crucial to the ongoing formation of women\u27s blues and to the development of the women who sing the blues
