Strummin' Foremothers
How many of you knew that June is Black Music Month? This celebration has been officially on the books since 1979, at the urging of the Black Music Association—an industry coalition co-founded by Kenny Gamble of Philadelphia International Records, music executive Ed Wright, and broadcaster Dyana Williams (who is widely credited with proposing the month itself)—President Carter signed the first proclamation on June 7 of that year. That's 47 years ago! (Note: President Obama rebranded it "African-American Music Appreciation Month" in 2009.)
Just about every American popular music vibe you have ever loved was first shaped by Black brilliance. From gospel to blues; jazz, R&B, and rock and roll; soul, funk, disco, hip-hop, house, neo-soul, trap. And if you like salsa, merengue, bachata, cumbia, calypso, samba, or the musician serenading me as I write this, Bad Bunny, they all trace their origin and soul back to Black roots. Not to mention all the hip African acts you might enjoy. Fela Kuti's Afrobeat (the Nigerian funk-jazz-political-fury of the late 1960s) is the parent of today's Afrobeats (with an s), the Nigerian pop genre that brought us Burna Boy, Wizkid, Tems, and Rema.
This issue of #SistoryLessons shines a light on three Foremothers you may not know very well. But we loved them for turning the guitar (so often associated with dudes) into an expression of their full female stories. Let's meet ly on the.
Mary and Lydia are featured in my book, Our Brave Foremothers, but, for the sake of accuracy, I'll point out neither of them are, strictly speaking, Black music artists. Lydia Mendoza built Tejano, a Mexican-Texan hybrid of corrido and German-Czech polka, and Mary Kaye built the Las Vegas lounge act on a Hawaiian instrumental inheritance with its own (also non-Black) ancestry. But there are linkages worth mentioning: Hawaiian steel guitar and Delta blues slide guitar are sonically related. And the Vegas lounge act Mary defined, the performance format itself rather than a musical genre, became the stage where Etta James, Della Reese, and Nancy Wilson shared their talents.
Lydia doesn’t carry a direct Blackness heritage: Tejano music absorbed German-Czech polka, not African polyrhythms. But the broader Mexican canon she came up in has a deep Afro-Mexican lineage most of us have never been told about. Son jarocho, the music of the Afro-Mexican communities of Veracruz, is built on the jarana (an eight-string descendant of the Spanish baroque guitar) and on rhythms brought by enslaved Africans from Angola and the Congo. The most famous son jarocho song is one you probably know, “La Bamba,” which the Library of Congress traces to a 1683 slave uprising in the port of Veracruz.
What unites these three women for this edition of #SistoryLessons is an instrument with roots in Africa. Sister Rosetta on her Gibson SG, Lydia on her twelve-string acoustic, Mary photographed with the white-blonde Stratocaster that became known as her namesake. The guitar itself has a layered heritage: Spanish-Moorish in origin (a descendant of the oud), Black in its amplified electric voice, and reminiscent of its West African ancestors: the ngoni, the akonting, the xalam, plucked lutes that enslaved people remade in America as the banjo.
So even though Mary and Lydia's musical genres officially sit outside the central canon of Black Music Month, I got to thinking about how much American popular music owes to the hybridization and mixing that is the strength of our national culture. In this socio-political and cultural moment that is all about division, let's keep learning, embracing, dancing, and strumming.
Sister Rosetta Tharpe: The Godmother of Rock and Roll
Sister Rosetta Tharpe was born Rosetta Nubin on March 20, 1915, in Cotton Plant, Arkansas, to a cotton-picking mother who was also a traveling evangelist for the Church of God in Christ. Rosetta was performing with a guitar by age four, recorded "Rock Me" for Decca Records in 1938, and turned the gospel-blues guitar into something the country had never quite heard, a sacred instrument played with the velocity of the secular world. She was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2018, forty-five years after her death.
The men who would become music icons: Elvis Presley, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Johnny Cash, and Jerry Lee Lewis all named Tharpe as the reason they picked up the guitar. Since this is still Pride Month, it’s compelling to think the acoustic-to-electric transition in American popular music has a queer Black woman at the center. Yes, Rosetta Tharpe had a long romantic partnership with gospel singer Marie Knight in the late 1940s, and while some in the gospel community turned their backs on her for this, the broader community protected each other's privacy over public disclosure. This posture was not atypical during the Jim Crow era, when protecting one's own community from outside scrutiny and exploitation and the threats of racism, violence, and economic sabotage was essential for cultural survival.
Reflection: What gifts have you shared with the world, even when someone else got the credit?
Lydia Mendoza: The Lark of the Border (La Alondra de la Frontera)
Lydia Mendoza was born in Houston, Texas, on May 21, 1916, into a Mexican immigrant family that traveled the Texas-to-Michigan migrant labor circuit playing for tips. Mendoza learned twelve-string guitar from her mother on a homemade instrument, sang on street corners and plaza stages before she could vote, and recorded her signature song, and what would become the cornerstone of commercial Tejano music, "Mal Hombre," for Bluebird Records (an RCA Victor subsidiary) in 1934 at age seventeen.
That single record sold across the Southwest and into Mexico, and turned a seventeen-year-old in a hand-sewn china poblana dress into the most famous woman in Mexican-American music. She would tour continuously for the next fifty years, performing in cantinas, migrant camps, prison yards, dance halls, plazas, Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, and the Festival of American Folklife on the National Mall. She would go on to record more than fifty albums in Spanish. Her crowds, often working migrant families who had driven hours to hear her, knew every verse and sang along.
She raised four daughters on the road, and was paid in coins for decades. Carrying the heritage of Mexican America through song, she received the National Heritage Fellowship in 1982 and the National Medal of Arts from President Clinton in 1999.
Reflection: What rhythms carry your family’s or community’s history?
Mary Kaye: Lounge Lady
Mary Kaye was born Mary Ka'aihue on January 9, 1924, to a Hawaiian musical family. Her father, Johnny Ka'aihue (also known as Johnny Ukulele, yes that what folks had to do!), had performed at the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco. Breaking into music herself, Mary anglicized her surname to Kaye for the American stage, and by the late 1930s the Ka'aihue siblings were performing as a family act in Chicago hotels. A later configuration, called the Mary Kaye Trio, with Mary on guitar and vocals, defined the late-night Las Vegas lounge act in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the performance format itself rather than a musical genre, an after-hours casino show that became the structural template for Las Vegas itself.
That lounge format mattered because Las Vegas in those years was a Jim Crow town. Black headliners like Sammy Davis Jr., Pearl Bailey, Nat King Cole, and Lena Horne sold out the casino showrooms but were barred from staying in the hotels, eating in the restaurants, or using the swimming pools. The Mary Kaye Trio, racially ambiguous to a white American audience that did not know what Native Hawaiian was, slipped past Jim Crow. Mary was aware of the system, and tipped the Black musicians who came through the lounge to jam after their headliner sets. The form she invented became the primary Vegas stage for Black women singers from the 1960s on, including Etta James, Della Reese, Esther Phillips, Nancy Wilson, Dakota Staton, and others.
In 1956 Fender released a custom Stratocaster designed around Mary's playing, the Mary Kaye Stratocaster, white-blonde body with gold hardware. It’s the first guitar Fender ever named after a woman. It is still in production.
She retired from regular performance in the 1970s, taught privately, and lived in Las Vegas until her death in 2007. She deserves to be much more known. The next time you see a Vegas residency announcement, whether by Adele, Usher, Mariah, or whoever, remember that a Native Hawaiian woman invented the format they're playing in.
Reflection: The Stratocaster that bears her name still sells in boutique guitar shops for upward of $3,000, but her own records are hardly known. How does that make you feel?
Reflection and Action: Journal Prompts for Everyone
Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s music had the power to lift people out of their seat. Who does that for you today?
Thinking of Lydia Mendoza, consider: how does music preserve cultural identity? Write about a song that connects you to your roots.
Mary Kaye's father had to take a ludicrously stereotypical name (Johnny Ukelele) in order to have his career, and she had to shorten her name to the last letter ("Kaye.") What other examples come to mind of entertainers erasing their culture or ethnicity in order to reach a mainstream (white) audience?
HerStory / OurStory: Journal Prompts for Women of Color
Thinking about Sister Rosetta Tharpe, who was a gay woman whose career launched from within the Black church, who else comes to mind for bridging two seemingly opposed universes?
As we celebrate Lydia Mendoza, what other musical styles from outside of your culture are you interested in listening to more?
What do you know, and not know, about Native Hawaiian (and other Polynesian) cultures? To salute Mary Kaye, who else is worth discovering?
Activated Allies: Prompts and Actions for White Friends
In honor of Black Music Month, learn more about the traditions that surrounded Sister Rosetta Tharpe and the legacy that followed her. The National Museum of African American Music in Nashville is one place to start.
To celebrate Lydia Mendoza, elevate Tejana and Chicana artisst in cultural preservation efforts. Listen to and promote music by BIPOC artists (See “Playlists,” at bottom of the newsletter)
Considering the Native Hawaiian (Polynesian) culture that is Mary Kaye's orgins, learn more about the Hawaiian Kingdom. The Council for Native Hawaiian Advancement is one organization currently doing the policy and cultural-preservation work.
More on Their Lives
Sister Rosetta Tharpe (1915–1973), Straddling the Sacred and the Secular
Rosetta Tharpe, born Rosetta Nubin on March 20, 1915, in Cotton Plant, Arkansas, grew up in the Mississippi Delta cotton belt where the Church of God in Christ (COGIC), the largest Black Pentecostal denomination in the United States, was being built into a national network. Her mother, Katie Bell Nubin, was a mandolin-playing evangelist who traveled the COGIC circuit; her father is unrecorded in most biographies, which is its own indictment of the inequalities and systemic instability experienced by the migrant cotton economy of the 1910s.
By the time Rosetta was six, mother and daughter were performing together in tent revivals across the South, a Black girl on a steel-string guitar in front of a Black congregation, in a denomination that, almost uniquely among American Christian traditions of the era, permitted women to preach.
She married Pastor Thomas Thorpe at nineteen, took a slightly modified version of his name, and by 1938 was recording for Decca Records in New York, the first commercially successful gospel artist on a major secular label. The same year, she performed at producer John Hammond's From Spirituals to Swing concert at Carnegie Hall. The concert was designed, by Hammond's own admission, to introduce a white audience to Black music. Tharpe was on the bill with Big Joe Turner, Pete Johnson, and the Count Basie Orchestra. She brought a guitar and a Pentecostal hand-clap to the most prestigious concert hall in America, and the crowd, as they say, went wild.
Her 1940s catalogue is the foundation of rock and roll. "Strange Things Happening Every Day" (1944) is, in the view of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and most contemporary musicologists, a serious candidate for the first rock and roll record, released a decade before Elvis Presley's "That's All Right" in 1954. She toured with the gospel singer Marie Knight from 1946 to 1950 in what is now widely understood, in the gospel-history literature, as a romantic partnership. If people in the COGIC congregations knew, they kept it quiet.
Tharpe played a Gibson SG, then a custom Les Paul, then a series of Gibson and Guild electrics that she ran through the gospel-tent catalog she had grown up with. The young white musicians who would later be marketed as the "inventors" of the rock and roll genre, including Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and Jerry Lee Lewis, went to her concerts and soaked up her genius.
She suffered a stroke in 1970, lost her left leg to complications from diabetes, and continued touring with one leg until weeks before her death on October 9, 1973, in Philadelphia. Sister Rosetta was buried in an unmarked grave for thirty-five years, until the Pennsylvania state historical marker went up in 2008. She was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2018, well too many years too late.
Lydia Mendoza (1916–2007), 12-String Star of the Borderlands
Lydia Mendoza was born on May 21, 1916, in Houston, Texas, the second of eight children to Francisco Mendoza, a Mexican railroad mechanic, and Leonor Zamarripa Mendoza, a homemade-instrument-maker who taught all her children to play music. The family traveled the Texas-to-Michigan migrant labor circuit through the 1920s and early 1930s, picking sugar beets in Michigan, cotton in the Rio Grande Valley, and walnuts in California, and performing for tips at every stop. Leonor built Lydia's first guitar from a cigar box and rubber bands. Her second instrument was a twelve-string she bought from a Pittsburgh pawnshop in 1929.
In 1934, in San Antonio, the family responded to a newspaper advertisement placed by Bluebird Records (an RCA Victor subsidiary) looking for Spanish-language artists for what the industry then called the "race record" market. Lydia, age seventeen, recorded "Mal Hombre," a tango-influenced lament about a man who had lied and abandoned a woman, alone, with her twelve-string and her voice. The record sold across the Southwest and into Mexico, becoming the first nationally distributed commercial recording of what would later be called Tejano music. Lydia did not have a recording contract, and she was paid roughly fifteen dollars for the session.
The next fifty years offer a sobering discrepancy about who counts as a working musician in this country. Lydia recorded more than fifty albums and toured continuously from the 1930s through the 1980s, performing in every place from cantinas and migrant camps to Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center. But, she refused to cave to Norteno tastes: even if American audiences didn't speak Spanish, she refused to translate her songs into English. Nor did she "modernize" her wardrobe from the traditional embroidered Mexican china poblana dresses that she sewed herself. Her insistence not to cater to what record labels called "the wider market" as well as (of course) sexism ensured Mendoza never saw fair wages or recognition.
But the genre she brought into being—música norteña—went from being sweetly folkloric to, by the 1990s, a billion-dollar industry. Sadly, Mendoza herself did not see most of the money that should have come her way. She raised her four daughters on the road, largely relying on the tip jar.
Mendoza was recognized to some extent during her lifetime, receiving the National Heritage Fellowship in 1982 (the highest honor the U.S. government gives a folk artist—$25,000 at the time) and the National Medal of Arts in 1999. She continues to be honored for her achievements: the Smithsonian holds her papers; Arhoolie Records, founded by Chris Strachwitz, holds her recordings; the Library of Congress has the field recordings Strachwitz made of her in the 1980s and 1990s. The Selena Museum in Corpus Christi acknowledges her on its wall.
Mary Kaye (1924–2007), A Stratocaster is Named After Her
Mary Kaye was born Mary Ka'aihue on January 9, 1924, to a Hawaiian father, Johnny Ka'aihue (known on the vaudeville circuit as Johnny Ukulele), and a mother of mixed Hawaiian and European descent. The Ka'aihue family was part of the small but significant Hawaiian musical diaspora that had been moving between the Islands and the U.S. mainland since the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, where Hawaiian guitar and steel guitar were introduced to a mass American audience. Mary's father had been on that 1915 stage, and his kids grew up inside the family business.
There was a connection between Hawaiian guitar tours and Black America, as these acts traveled the American South from the 1900s through the 1920s, at one point the most popular live concert format in the country. Today's musicologists widely credit the bottleneck slide technique of Delta blues guitarists like Tampa Red, Bukka White, and Son House as descending in part from those Hawaiian shows. Sol Hoʻopiʻi, the foundational Hawaiian steel guitarist of the recording era, moved from Honolulu to Los Angeles in 1919, signed with Brunswick Records, and played jazz alongside Black musicians on the West Coast. Mary's father Johnny worked that same trans-Pacific circuit. Few American listeners have been told about this Pacific–Black-American musical lineage.
By the late 1930s the Ka'aihue siblings (Mary, Norman, and Henrietta) were performing as a family act in Chicago hotels. After World War II, Mary and Norman partnered with the pianist Frank Ross, anglicized the surname to Kaye, and moved to Las Vegas. The Mary Kaye Trio began an after-hours run in the casino lounges in the late 1940s, a midnight-to-dawn show that ran while the headliner shows were dark. The format was originally a financial workaround: the hotels needed entertainment for the late-night gambling crowd but did not want to pay headliner rates. The trio worked for tips, scale, and a guaranteed booking.
Mary Kaye "invented" the lounge act in 1950 at Las Vegas's Last Frontier hotel. After the owner wanted to keep her trio working past their main showroom engagement, Mary suggested building a stage in the bar area and borrowed the word "lounge" from railroad lounge cars to name it. Her trio featured Mary on electric guitar, her brother Norman singing, and comedian Frank Ross, who improvised comedy and held crowds through multiple sets from 1–6 a.m. The all-night format helped turn Las Vegas into a 24-hour town, and the Mary Kaye Trio became the first lounge group advertised as such, eventually becoming the highest-paid lounge act in Las Vegas history.
Las Vegas in this era was a Jim Crow town. Sammy Davis Jr., Pearl Bailey, Nat King Cole, and Lena Horne sold out the same casino headliner halls where they were forbidden to stay, eat, or use the pool. The Mary Kaye Trio, racially ambiguous to a white American audience unfamiliar with Native Hawaiian identity, slipped past the color line and stayed in hotels where Black headliners were locked out. Mary was not oblivious to this. She practiced her own form of cooperative economics, generously tipping the Black musicians who came through the lounge to jam after their headliner sets. Frank Sinatra, a Mary Kaye fan, was part of the same circuit and was among the white headliners who pressured Vegas casinos to integrate during the 1950s.
The lounge became both a physical space—a late-night casino focal point where stars and ordinary patrons mixed—and a performance template: music and comedy, intimate and improvisational, running after the headliner shows went dark. By the late 1950s every major casino had one, and the Mary Kaye Trio had played most of them. The format opened the door for Louis Prima and others who came to define the vintage Las Vegas image, and it became the primary Vegas stage for Black women singers from the 1960s forward — Etta James, Della Reese, Esther Phillips, Nancy Wilson, Dakota Staton, and dozens more whose careers ran through the lounges the trio had defined.
In 1956 Fender released a special-edition Stratocaster built around Mary's playing: white-blonde body, gold hardware, slightly thinner neck. The guitar appeared in advertisements bearing her name. It is still in production; the current reissue retails for around $3,000.
What Mary invented was the late-night Vegas lounge act itself—the after-hours show and the performance template—not "lounge music" as a genre. The exotica, cocktail-jazz, and easy-listening sound that label later attached to has separate parents: Les Baxter, Martin Denny, Henry Mancini, Yma Sumac, and the broader 1950s tiki-and-hi-fi scene.
Mary retired from regular performance in the 1970s, taught privately, and lived in Las Vegas until her death in around 2007. The next time you see a Vegas residency announcement, whether by Adele, Usher, Mariah, or whoever, remember that a Native Hawaiian woman paved the way.
What These Women Knew, and What We Must Remember
Sister Rosetta Tharpe carried a Pentecostal hand-clap into Carnegie Hall, Lydia Mendoza recorded a genre-defying ballad "Mal Hombre" alone at seventeen, in Spanish; Mary Kaye turned the late-night Vegas lounge into a stage where Black women singers locked out of casino hotels could make their careers, and she tipped the Black musicians who came to jam, because she knew where her position in the system cost less than theirs did.
These women teach us a lot about heart, soul, generosity, truth, and joy. And I think in these times, as worn out as we are from the constant barrage of bad news, tragedy, and nonsense that surround our airwaves and news feeds, we both need and deserve to emulate their approach. Speak your truth, with joy and conviction, and it may surprise you how many people join in!
P.S.: How Latin Music Is Black Music
As we already explored, Tejano and conjunto, the genres Lydia Mendoza helped broaden, are the least Afro-Latino of the major Latin styles. Their accordion came north with German and Czech immigrants to South Texas in the 1860s; their songbook is ranchera and corrido, not son or bomba. Mendoza belongs in any honest count of Foremothers who strummed anyway, but she does not, on her own, carry the Black thread of Latin music. Most of the rest of the canon does.
Reggaeton is built on a Jamaican Black riddim. The foundational "Dem Bow" beat, the one underneath "Gasolina," "Despacito," "Tití Me Preguntó," and every reggaeton single of the last thirty-five years, was produced by Jamaican dancehall engineers Steely & Clevie and Bobby "Digital" Dixon in 1990 for Shabba Ranks' track Dem Bow. From there the sound moved into Panama as reggae en español (El General, Nando Boom, Renato, late 1980s), then into Puerto Rican underground cassettes (DJ Playero, the 1990s), then into the global stadium music we know now. Tego Calderón and Ivy Queen, two of its biggest architects, are Afro-Puerto Rican and have said so on the record for two decades. Bad Bunny is Afro-Boricua.
Salsa is Black music with a Spanish vocabulary. Cuban son (Spanish guitar laid over West African drumming), Afro-Puerto Rican bomba and plena (the music of the enslaved on the Caribbean sugar plantations), and Afro-Cuban rumba and mambo are the four foundations. The 1960s and 1970s New York salsa scene that built the commercial genre was led by Celia Cruz, Héctor Lavoe, Ray Barretto, Eddie Palmieri, Willie Colón, La Lupe, and Graciela. Most of these musicians were Black, a fact that most American radio listeners did not know.
Cumbia began as a courtship dance among enslaved Africans on the Caribbean coast of Colombia. Champeta, also from Cartagena, was a direct import of Congolese soukous and Nigerian highlife records that sailors carried into the city's port in the 1960s. Merengue, bachata, palos, and gagá are Afro-Dominican; bachata was rejected by Dominican elite radio for decades for being "too Black." Samba and bossa nova descend from West African batuque rhythms brought to Brazil by enslaved people. Even tango has Afro-Argentine roots in candombe. The only reason most people do not know is that the Afro-Argentine population was systematically erased through nineteenth-century war and immigration policy.
If you want a starter listen for Black Music Month with a Latin American passport, try Celia Cruz, La Lupe, Graciela, Toña la Negra, Susana Baca, Ivy Queen, Tego Calderón, Choc Quib Town, Petrona Martínez, and Lila Downs (especially her Afro-Mexican and Mixtec work). Add anything by Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Lydia Mendoza already on your playlist. Check out one of our Brave Sis Project Celebration Playlists, which are at this time housed on Spotify.
Thanks for reading this edition of #SistoryLessons, a biweekly newsletter that uses the lessons from Foremothers who led the way as encouragement and guide for these times of resilience. The series is based on stories from my award-winning book, Our Brave Foremothers: Celebrating 100 Black, Brown, Asian, and Indigenous Women Who Changed the Course of History, and other, ongoing research.