Winner of the Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award, Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Winner of the American Book Award, Before Columbus Foundation Winner of the PEN Oakland–Josephine Miles Award Winner of the MAAH Stone Book Award A Pitchfork Best Music Book of the Year A Rolling Stone Best Music Book of the Year A Boston Globe Summer Read “Brooks traces all kinds of lines…inviting voices to talk to one another, seeing what different perspectives can offer, opening up new ways of looking and listening.” ― New York Times “A wide-ranging study of Black female artists, from elders like Bessie Smith and Ethel Waters to Beyoncé and Janelle Monáe…Connecting the sonic worlds of Black female mythmakers and truth-tellers.” ― Rolling Stone “A gloriously polyphonic book.” ―Margo Jefferson, author of Negroland How is it possible that iconic artists like Aretha Franklin and Beyoncé can be both at the center and on the fringe of the culture industry? Daphne Brooks explores more than a century of music archives to bring to life the critics, collectors, and listeners who have shaped our perceptions of Black women both on stage and in the recording studio. Liner Notes for the Revolution offers a startling new perspective, informed by the overlooked contributions of other Black women artists. We discover Zora Neale Hurston as a sound archivist and performer, Lorraine Hansberry as a queer feminist critic of modern culture, and Pauline Hopkins as America’s first Black female cultural commentator. Brooks tackles the complicated racial politics of blues music recording, song collecting, and rock and roll criticism in this long overdue celebration of Black women musicians as radical intellectuals. “Brooks traces all kinds of lines, finding unexpected points of connection…inviting voices to talk to one another, seeing what different perspectives can offer, opening up new ways of looking and listening by tracing lineages and calling for more space.” ― New York Times “Daphne Brooks has written a gloriously polyphonic book. Moving through the tumult of the twentieth century and the millennium, she scores, archives, and curates the history of Black woman musicians and their radical modernities, all created in a culture that presumed they had no voices or minds. What did they do to be so Black, brilliant, and blue? Listen. And read on.” ― Margo Jefferson, author of the National Book Critics Circle Award–winning Negroland “Brooks takes on a wide-ranging study of Black female artists, from elders like Bessie Smith and Ethel Waters to Beyoncé and Janelle Monáe. But she reaches far beyond music, exploring writers like Zora Neale Hurston and Pauline Hopkins… Liner Notes is a secret history…connecting the sonic worlds of Black female mythmakers and truth-tellers.” ― Rob Sheffield , Rolling Stone “Brooks moves deftly between eras, from early-twentieth-century blues and vaudeville to Lemonade -era Beyoncé…In articulating the intellectual labor of so many Black women artists―unknown, ‘undertheorized,’ or both―she implicitly acknowledges those who, for whatever reason, didn’t make it into the capital-A archive, but whose contributions surround us nonetheless… Liner Notes is a loud warning shot: seeing Black women everywhere is not the same as seeing Black women.” ― Rawiya Kameir , Bookforum “Takes on the weighty task of sifting through more than a century’s worth of music history, cultural criticism and long forgotten archives to explore the revolutionary practices of Black women musicians…Brooks is effusive in her belief that not only did these women exist in spaces previously thought to be exclusively white, she suggests their impact can be felt in all spheres of music today.” ― Stephanie Phillips , The Wire “A passionate book, written with a vigorous confidence…Brooks’s command of history and her reading are broad and deep…Instinct says there is a large audience that is not only sympathetic to what she has to say but would be charged up by Brooks’s ideas, that would hear in the music what Brooks hears.” ― George Grella , Brooklyn Rail “Effortlessly poetic, deeply historical, and insistently imaginative, Liner Notes for the Revolution doesn’t merely give voice to unheeded and crucial innovators; it offers a new method for approaching music history itself.” ― Ann Powers, author of Good Booty “Daphne Brooks’s brilliant evocation of what gets lost when women of color don’t speak, let alone sing, is one of the most moving testaments to the power of silence, and what breaking that silence means, that I have ever read. Vivid, joyful, and heartbreaking in its passionate understanding of soul in all its manifestations, Liner Notes for the Revolution is itself a new kind of music: propulsive, witty, wise, and true.” ― Hilton Als, author of White Girls “For Daphne Brooks, black feminist sound is sensuous thought. In Liner Notes for the Revolution , she feels and shows and says this with such devotion, such criti