Music Industry

Source:

 Black Women in America, Second Edition

Music Industry

The story of black women in the American music industry reflects all the issues of gender, class, and race that have bedeviled Americans throughout their history. Still, black women have been involved in making music in America, and in the making of American music, since they first stepped ashore in 1619. From churches to slave festivals, cotton fields to smokehouses, middle-class parlors to the greatest concert halls of the world—black women were there. They faced the same restrictions as did white women and all of the prejudices that hindered black men, but they persevered.

An industry connected to music did not develop until the late nineteenth century and cannot be divorced from the development of the entertainment industry. Because of issues of money and control, women, and especially black women, in both industries were frequently in the background, when they found a place at all. It was only at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first that black women finally began to gain entry into the highest positions of power. However, behind the power and off the beaten track, black women have been tremendously important in the various phases and forms of the music and entertainment industries.

The Birth of an Industry

Until the late nineteenth century, both popular and classical music in the United States was published as broadside ballads or as sheet music. There was no system in place to give the creators and publishers (much less the performers) of music any rights or payment for their product. It took the Industrial Revolution to create the fertile ground from which the twin industries of music and entertainment would grow. Newly middle class households wanted to emulate the wealthy. Their goal was for women to stay at home and learn the “finer arts,” as befitted their new class status. Only one instrument, the piano, was deemed acceptable for a woman to play. By the 1880s, relatively cheap, mass-produced, upright pianos were gracing parlors all over America. It could even be argued that the American music industry owes its birth to thousands of women in cities all over America who wanted something to play on their new pianos.

These women needed music that was easier to play, more familiar, and more inclusive than was European classical music. As much as they wanted to emulate the wealthy, they also wanted some entertainment for their newfound leisure time. They needed something the entire family could enjoy, songs everyone could sing. Tin Pan Alley came to the rescue. An area of New York City named for the cacophonous sound of many upright pianos pounding out new song compositions, Tin Pan Alley created a mass-produced music product for the American people. By 1895, sales of sheet music were such that Tin Pan Alley music publishers were able to influence publishing and copyright laws. In that year, they formed the Music Publishers Association of the United States. The American music industry was under way.

It is now generally accepted that the music of Tin Pan Alley owed an enormous debt to African Americans, both men and women. However, there were only a few black music publishing companies, most notably Gotham Attucks and Pace-Handy, and none were started or managed by women. In fact, few black women can be directly connected to the business of Tin Pan Alley, and those who can be were performers whose link to the industry was through advertising. At Tin Pan Alley's height, only a few black women were popular enough to be used on sheet music covers to advertise the music. One was Aida Overton Walker, who was pictured on the cover of the sheet music for “I'd Like to Be a Lady” as well as on “Build a Nest for Birdie.” Two others were Hattie Payton of The Paytons and Estelle Johnson.

This same absence from the new industry can be seen in the development of one of its most important organizations: the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP). Founded in 1914 by the publishers and composers of Tin Pan Alley, ASCAP soon had a virtual monopoly over the American music industry. Yet even by 1925 there were only six black members, in part because ASCAP excluded the “vernacular forms” such as blues and country, then known as race and hillbilly music. According to Reebee Garofalo in the article “Music Publishing to MP3”:

"Copyright laws kept artistic expression firmly anchored to the European cultural tradition of notated music, in that the claim for royalties was based on the registration of melodies and lyrics, the aspects of music that most readily lend themselves to notation. Artists or countries with musical traditions based on rhythm rather than melody or those that valued improvisation over notation were excluded from the full benefit of copyright protection right from the start."

However, it was these marginalized vernacular forms that would turn the music industry on its head.

From the days of Tin Pan Alley through the era of rock and roll, the place to find powerful African American women was on the edges of the mainstream or at the beginning of a musical movement. Once a musical form became mainstream, black women often lost out to the national corporations that had no place for them. One of the first such examples, and one of black women's often unacknowledged American music industry influences, was about burst into American music.

God and the Devil: Blues, Jazz, and Gospel

Tin Pan Alley may have started the American music industry, but the record revolutionized it. Once recorded music entered the scene, the distinction between the recording industry and the music industry was largely erased. The development of blues and jazz coincided with this technological change. Blues and jazz were harder to notate than was popular music, so the development of the recording industry was essential to spreading their popularity. At the start of it all were black women and the “race record.”

According to Donald Bogle in Brown Sugar, the race record “arrived in the hands of a black woman.” Mamie Smith recorded “Crazy Blues” in 1920 for Perry Bradford, and the record sold 200,000 copies in the first year alone. The popularity of the race record spawned an entire industry. In addition, for the first time a positive image of the proud, strong, unapologetic, lower- or working-class African American woman was presented to the white public. No doubt to the horror of some, the blues diva altered white America's perceptions of African Americans. Bogle notes that, “By the mid-twenties the blues sisters had had such an extraordinary effect on popular culture that even so mainstream a publication as Vanity Fair ran an article about the blues performers Ethel Waters, Bessie Smith, and Clara Smith.” These same women created the foundations of rhythm and blues and rock and roll as well as the auxiliary styles those forms spawned.

Many of these women had an unusual amount of control over their lives and careers. Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, the “Mother of the Blues,” created and managed her own traveling company, the Georgia Jazz Band. Ma Rainey was not only an artist of extraordinary talent and presence but was also a stylist credited with altering the basic nature of the minstrel and vaudeville circuit. The “Uncrowned Queen of the Blues,” Ida Cox also had her own revue, wrote her own music, and hired the musicians. Bessie Smith, “the Empress of the Blues,” brought the blues to white as well as to black audiences. She managed her own road band and traveled with an entourage. She circumvented segregated accommodations by traveling in her own railroad car, which would be detached when it arrived at the town for a performance. By 1924 Bessie Smith had become the highest-paid black performer in America, earning $2,000 per week.

Another blues queen, Ethel Waters opened a number of doors in the music and entertainment industries that other African Americans were later able to walk through. In the 1920s, while she was the highest-paid woman on Broadway, she was also being paid $2,500 per week to sing in a nightclub and at the same time sang on the radio with the Jack Denny Orchestra. It is no coincidence that the control these women maintained over their business lives is reflected in the freedom expressed in their music.

Still, while some black women made money for themselves, most black women musicians made a lot more money for other people. During the 1920s Ma Rainey made so much money for the new recording company Paramount that she turned it into one of the major record labels of the era. Similarly, Smith played a direct role in the rescue of financially troubled Columbia Records, even though she didn't earn royalties on her recordings. According to at least one source, Clarence Williams, who brought Smith to Columbia Records, attempted to defraud her and take half her earnings. Smith was both savvy and powerful enough to put an end to this. Unfortunately, many women were not.

The Swing/Big Band era created another type of singer in the jazz/blues idiom, the “girl singer,” but these women generally enjoyed even less control. The bands of this era were managed and led by men, even when the women had top billing. The most famous of these women was Billie Holiday, who made hundreds of recordings but received royalties on only a few. An exception to the rule, at least for a time, was Ella Fitzgerald, who served as the singer but also led Chick Webb's big band for a few years after he died.

If the blues queens were exploited, they at least had a period of stunning success. If the girl singers had less control, they at least had some measure of fame and acceptance. For the women instrumentalists of jazz, however, financial success and fame were rarely attainable. The February 1938 article, “Why Women Musicians Are Inferior” in Down Beat magazine was just one example of the lack of respect for women's abilities in jazz playing. However inferior women were considered as instrumentalists, they were thought to be completely incapable of running the business behind the music. Though World War II provided opportunities for a number of all-girl jazz bands such as the International Sweethearts of Rhythm, Vi Burnside & Her All Stars, the Darlings of Rhythm, the Harlem Playgirls, the American Syncopators, and the Prairie View Co-Eds, most of these groups were unable to continue after the men returned from the war.

Singers aside, most women musicians succeeded on the only instrument deemed acceptable for women at the time, the piano. Despite hardship, the pianist Lovie Austin composed, performed, and worked as a bandleader on the Theater Owners Booking Association (TOBA) circuit. Lil Hardin Armstrong composed, played the piano, and was the “woman behind the man” in teaching and managing her famed husband, Louis. Particularly early in their careers, Hardin Armstrong ran the business side of their affairs. The pianist Blanche Calloway, Cab's sister, led her own band, the Joy Boys, and later in her career managed the rhythm and blues great Ruth Brown.

Both Hardin Armstrong and Austin bring up another point about the development of American music. They were both trained musicians. Austin received musical training from Roger Williams University and Knoxville College. Hardin Armstrong received a postgraduate degree from the New York College of Music. Black women musicians were frequently the only musically educated members of a band. As a result, it was the women who made the notations, preserved an arrangement for posterity, and provided the publishers of the industry with scores. However, it was in another genre of music, gospel, that black women had real power in the music publishing industry.

As it did not with the nightclub venues of blues and jazz, society often accepted women's creativity if it was expressed in the church, but even gospel music was radical at first. In the 1920s and 1930s, gospel was not allowed in many churches, much less published, recorded, or played on the radio. Decades later, the gospel music industry would sell tens of millions of records and generate hundreds of millions of dollars in sales, and it could be fairly stated that black women were at the forefront of making gospel a commercial form, both as artists and entrepreneurs.

Gospel took longer to become a successful recorded form of music than did jazz or blues. It did, however, become a well-published form right away. It is stunning to see the list of women who published gospel music, especially compared to the dearth of female names in other music forms. While some of these women are virtually unknown, others are rightly credited with making gospel music internationally renowned.

Sallie Martin, “the mother of gospel music,” helped popularize the form, not only composing classic gospel songs and forming legendary choirs but also organizing “the gospel highway circuit” of venues where the music was accepted. She worked with “the father of gospel,” Thomas Dorsey, and helped turn his music store into a profit-making enterprise. In 1933, she and Dorsey, along with Beatrice Brown and others, organized the National Convention of Gospel Choirs and Choruses. Perhaps most importantly, certainly from an industry point of view, Martin was the co-founder of the Martin and Morris Publishing Company, later the largest black gospel publishing house in the United States. Founded in 1940, the company stayed in business until the 1980s. Martin served as the company's “song-plugger,” taking the music on the road to publicize it. In its heyday, the Martin and Morris Publishing Company made Sallie Martin the country's wealthiest gospel artist. She sold her share to co-founder Kenneth Morris in 1973.

Among the other female pioneers of the gospel music industry was Willie Mae Ford Smith, who helped found the National Convention of Gospel Choirs and Choruses (NCGC) and put together that organization's Soloist's Bureau. Roberta Martin founded the Roberta Martin Music Studios and is often credited not only for her artistry but also for the ways in which she linked spirituality, music making, and commerce. With Sallie Martin, she arranged one of the first Gospel concerts that charged admission, at DuSable High School in Chicago. Clara Ward not only revolutionized the sound of gospel but she also brought it everywhere, even to nightclubs, but it was Ward's mother, Gertrude, who ran the business end of the show. Gertrude Ward founded the Clara Ward House of Music publishing company. A shrewd businesswoman, she often double-billed concerts with The Ward Singers and The Clara Ward Specials and received a percentage for both as the booking agent.

Lillian Bowles was an early gospel music publisher who ran the Bowles Music House out of Chicago. Margaret Aikens, Lucille Campbell Bowles, Dorothy Akers, and Beatrice Seay all published gospel. The pioneering names in early gospel, Sallie Martin, Roberta Martin, and Clara Ward, all published their own music as well as that of others.

One later company that published gospel was Conrad Music. During the 1950s and 1960s, the recording arm of the company, Vee Jay Records, produced some of the nation's most popular gospel records. But it was Vee Jay Records's involvement with recording a new kind of music called rhythm and blues that would make the company important in the history of the music industry.

Rhythm and Blues to Disco and Soul

Vivian Bracken founded Vee Jay Records in 1953 with her husband and brother, and for the next decade they recorded some of the most important gospel groups in the country. But Vee Jay is best known as an early independent producer of blues, rhythm and blues, and rock and roll records. Almost a decade before Motown hit the charts, Vee Jay Records was churning out recordings of these newer musical styles. In fact, Vee Jay first brought the Beatles' music to American audiences. Among the many other stars and groups who recorded with Vee Jay were the Four Seasons, John Lee Hooker, Jerry Butler, and Betty Everett and the Dells. Though the company went into bankruptcy in 1966, it was the first major black-owned record label in the United States and was instrumental in making R & B and rock and roll the new musical phenomenon.

Motown was the second major black-owned record label in the country. Ramona Gordy—wife of the founder, Berry Gordy—claimed to have been a co-founder of the company but says she was asked to remove her name from the papers by her husband. Though not co-owned by a black woman, the company had more women working in prominent positions behind the scenes than did any other recording company of the time. Prior to Motown's founding, Berry Gordy's sisters, Gwen and Anna, owned their own recording company, Anna Records. In addition, Gwen founded Tri-Phi Records with her husband, Harvey Fuqua. A renowned producer and composer, she later started Gwen Glenn Productions, Der-Glenn Publishing Company, and Old Brompton Road Publishing Company. She and her sisters Anna and Esther all became vice presidents at Motown, and Gwen is credited with founding the company's famed Artist Development Department. In addition, Maxine Powell ran the finishing school of the department, which taught etiquette to Motown performers.

Suzanne de Passe, however, is the best-known Motown woman. Perhaps the most successful black woman film and television producer in Hollywood, she was hired by Motown in 1968. De Passe discovered Michael Jackson and the Jackson 5 and went on to develop Lionel Richie and the Commodores, the Four Seasons, Thelma Houston, and the Temptations before she moved into the film and television divisions of the company.

Unfortunately, Vee Jay and Motown did not signal the beginning of a run of record labels owned or even well staffed by black women. For the majority of black women, the advent of rhythm and blues meant “business as usual,” even though they yet again changed the face of American music. One R&B pioneer, Ruth Brown, made so much money for Atlantic Records, an independent record company, that it was dubbed “the House that Ruth Built.” Yet she did not see most of the royalties due her until decades later.

The famed girl groups of the late 1950s and 1960s faced the same sorts of difficulties. They earned millions of dollars for their record companies, yet were only rarely paid the money they deserved. For example, in 1961 the Shirelles were the first all-female group to top the singles charts, with “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” Over the next two years, ten more of the group's songs made it into the Top 40 charts. Yet despite their success, they discovered that the money that had been put in trust for them by their record company, run by Florence Greenberg, had allegedly been spent on promotion, touring, and recording costs. The Shirelles were hardly alone. Many of the girl groups of the era experienced the same thing.

Considering that taking advantage of artists, white or black, male or female, seemed to be the overarching credo of the recording industry, it is stunning that some of these young women had the courage to challenge the status quo. The Shirelles sued Greenberg. The Crystals, who recorded with Phil Spector, also sued for unpaid royalties. They lost but ultimately did regain the right to use the group's name, as did the Blue Belles, who also took their record company to court. Control of the group's name was vital to the success of any girl group, as the individual members were less known, or entirely unknown. Nona Hendryx, a member of the Blue Belles, said that though they lost a great deal of money due them for the success of their records, gaining control of the group's name allowed them to work without limitations that otherwise would likely have spoiled their continued success.

The Supremes, of course, are the ultimate girl group of the era. They, along with Mary Wells and others, can be credited with turning Motown into one of the most successful black businesses in the country. The Supremes in particular crossed the color line and were the first black group to achieve enough fame to be merchandised, a process that would soon become as much a part of the recording industry as the songs. By the end of the 1960s, the Supremes were recording commercials and were among the first black performers to have marketing tie-ins associated with their name: the Supremes White Bread.

However, despite the success female performers brought to Motown and the number of women on the staff, the company was not free of the exploitative practices typically associated with record companies. For example, when Florence Ballard, one of the founders of the Supremes, split from the group, she signed a settlement that gave her only $2,500 per year for six years and no more royalties on the songs she recorded as a member. She found a lawyer and renegotiated, but her lawyer absconded with the money. Even though he was found and disbarred, only $50,000 ever came to Ballard. Diana Ross, on the other hand, parlayed her growing prominence in the Supremes into an enormously successful solo career. In 1989 she bought 2 percent of Motown.

Other performers at Motown tried to take control of their careers and their money. Martha Reeves of the Vandellas challenged Motown when she asked for an accounting of her group's earnings. Mary Wells sued to be released from her contract, arguing that she had signed it as a minor. Perhaps not surprisingly, Mary Wells had a female personal manager, her childhood friend Maye James. James moved on to work as vice president of promotions for a variety of labels, including Scepter Records and Roadshow Records. In so doing, she became one of the first black women to hold such a position.

The blues singer Victoria Spivey took advantage of the blues revival to start her own record label in the early 1960s. An enormous success in the 1920s, Spivey continued to perform and record through the 1950s when she retired. She came out of retirement a short ten years later to create Spivey Records in around 1962. Spivey recorded her own work as well as that of legends such as Memphis Slim, Alberta Hunter, Lonnie Johnson, Otis Spann, the Muddy Waters Band, Big Joe Williams, Roosevelt Sykes, and Koko Taylor. A young Bob Dylan was featured as an accompanist on one of Spivey's first records, Kings and the Queen, Volume 2.> In 1970 the jazz singer Betty Carter founded her own label, Bet-Car Records, and produced five albums. Two of those albums received Grammy nominations, and Look What I Got won in 1988.

An early music industry entrepreneur who did not get her start as an artist was Ruth Bowen, the founder and president of the Queen Booking Corporation. She was introduced to the music industry through her husband, Bill Bowen, one of the original Ink Spots, and in 1946 became Dinah Washington's press secretary. She founded her first company, Queen Artists, in 1959. This company had expanded to become the Queen Booking Corporation by 1969 and was the largest black-owned entertainment agency in the world. Among the most famous performers handled by the company were Sammy Davis Jr., Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, Patti LaBelle and the Blue Belles, the Drifters, and Curtis Mayfield.

In the 1980s, new economics and new music forms yet again challenged black women in American music. MTV became the ultimate arbiter of success, and it took many years for a black person, much less a black woman, to get aired on the music video channel. The new white music forms of Punk and New Wave were garnering all the attention. Disco, Glam Rock, and Soul, despite the best efforts of Donna Summers, Patti LaBelle, and Aretha Franklin, were losing popularity. However, one album was soon to change the relationship between black women and the mainstream music industry.

Whitney Houston and Beyond

On Valentine's Day 1985, Whitney Houston released her first album. It immediately went to the top of the charts, making Houston the first female solo artist to have an album debut at number one. Her stunning success opened doors at MTV through which a new breed of black women artists followed, among them Janet Jackson. Jackson took over her career when she became her own manager, deposing her father. In 1991, she moved to Virgin Records for somewhere between $32 and $60 million. By the end of the twentieth century, she was co-writing some of her music and was credited as a co-producer on many of her songs. However, even as Houston and Jackson were changing the role of and respect for black women performers in the pop music industry, it was again on the fringes of a new culture and musical form where black women could find the openness to build their own empires: rap and hiphop.

The perception of the business end of rap and hiphop is that a few “bad boy” music moguls changed the music industry as well as America. While true, this simplification ignores, yet again, the influence of the women. Ironically, rap—a form frequently criticized as misogynist—has produced some of the most independent and powerful black women in the history of the American music industry. In fact, a black woman named Sylvia Robinson helped to start it all.

Robinson was a mid-level music industry pioneer who owned several record labels, including All-Platinum, Stang, Turbo, and Vibration, as well as the rights to Chess Records. In the late 1970s, she recognized the business possibilities behind rap music and created her own rap group, the Sugarhill Gang. The group recorded “Rappers Delight,” which reached 36 in the Top 40 charts and became the first crossover rap hit. As a result of her success with “Rapper's Delight,” Robinson founded Sugarhill Records, which recorded some of the classic rappers, including Grandmaster Flash and the Sequence.

Maye James is credited with bringing rap music to mainstream radio through the radio personality “Mr. Majic!” when she was music director of New York's WBLS. Because the show was so successful, other New York stations added rap to their format, and the genre ultimately caught on throughout the country. James returned to the recording side of the industry when she became the General Manager of Black Music for SBK Records. She later became the president of Unique Artistry and Hampton Marketing.

Twenty-first century music superstars were a far cry from the exploited pawns of the past. Though unscrupulous activities certainly still existed, the young women who made it to the top of the charts in the first years of the new millennium expected to control both their financial and creative destinies, an expectation that existed because of the hard-fought battles of their musical forebears.

The Mainstream Music Industry in the New Millennium

In terms of black women's involvement in the American music industry, management of the major labels is the highest level of achievement. For all of the money black women made for record labels in the twentieth century, none were allowed to ascend to the level of top management. This finally and slowly began to change as a result of empowerment by the civil rights movement and the women's movement, as well as changes in the industry itself. By the 1990s, black women had spent twenty years working their way to the top.

As of 1995, there were six major labels and distribution companies in the United States: Warner Elektra Atlantic (WEA), PolyGram Group Distribution, MCA Music Entertainment, BMG Distribution, Sony Music Entertainment, and CEMA/UNI. (By 2003, the names and alliances had changed only slightly.) These companies, either through distribution contracts with independent labels or through their own divisions and sub-labels, made up 90 percent of the U.S. market, totaling $12 billion in domestic sales alone. At the time, black music in the forms of urban contemporary, hip hop, jazz, gospel, and pop music accounted for over 25 percent of all record sales and brought in $3 billion in U.S. sales each year.

In 1991, when Sylvia Rhone was named CEO of East West Records, she was at the top of the heap in terms of black women in the corporate music industry. The first black woman to serve as CEO of a major record label, Rhone soon became the chair of the Elektra Entertainment Group, a subsidiary of Warner-Elektra-Atlantic with gross revenues of at least $400 million annually. She held this position until 2004.

Sylvia Rhone was the first black woman to become CEO of a major recording company.

Austin/Thompson Collection, courtesy of Eastwest Records America

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Often overshadowed in the press by her husband, Kenny “Babyface” Edmonds, Tracey Edmonds also became a powerhouse in the music industry. As co-owner, president, and CEO of Edmonds Entertainment Group, in 2004 Edmonds was responsible for a budget of $5 million and a staff of sixty. Edmonds Entertainment grew to include Edmonds Music Publishing, Edmonds Management, and Edmonds Record Group, as well as a film company, e2 Filmworks, and a recording studio, Tracken Place.

Strong prejudices remained, however. Most women found their place or at least their start at the major labels as salespeople or promoters, and by the beginning of the twenty-first century the number of black women who had served as vice presidents of promotion was quite stunning and impossible to list here. They include LaVerne Perry-Kennedy, senior vice president of publicity with Columbia/Epic Records/Sony Music; Lisa Ellis, senior vice president in charge of R&B and crossover promotion at Columbia/Epic Records; Michelle Madison, vice president of R&B promotion for Elektra Entertainment Group; Ornetta Barber Dickerson, vice president of marketing in the Black Music Division of Warner-Elektra-Atlantic; Cynthia Johnson-Harris, a senior vice president of Urban Promotion for Columbia Records; Gwen E. Franklin, a former vice president of marketing for Mercury Records, among others; and Juanita Stephens, a former vice president of publicity for Bad Boy/Arista Records before she started her own company JKS Media Relations. Johnnie Walker, founder of the National Association of Black Female Executives in Music and Entertainment (NABFEME), became a senior vice president of R&B promotion for Russell Simmons's Island Def Jam Music Group.

Other women, though fewer of them, managed to move into the Artist and Repertoire (A&R) Divisions of the major labels or actually ran a sub-label. Jean Riggins became an executive vice president and general manager at Universal Records. Riggins worked her way up through several key positions among the major industry labels. She was president of Black Music for Universal and before that vice president and general manager of Black Music at Capitol Records. In 1985, Vivian Scott Chew became the first African American woman to become a membership representative at ASCAP. Among many positions at the major labels, she served as the head of A&R and Urban Music Division for Epic Records before founding her own entertainment company, Chew Entertainment, and a marketing and promotions firm, TimeZone International.

Black women outside the mainstream were able to find their expression in the music industry by starting up smaller labels as well, particularly in the gospel genre. Vicki Mack Lataillade, the CEO of Gospo Centric Record Label, the company that first signed gospel superstar Kirk Franklin. Another leader in the gospel recording field, Raina Bundy worked on her own and among the major labels. She was the head of Lection Records, the gospel music division of Polygram before starting her own gospel label, Fixit Records. In 1993, her company won a Best Gospel Album Grammy for Edwin Hawkins's Music and Arts Seminar. While running her own label, Bundy also worked at Columbia Records as a vice president of A&R and Marketing. In 1997, she was chosen to head, as vice president and general manager, Sony Music's gospel label, Harmony Records.

In the modern world, the auxiliaries to the recording industry, such as music videos and entertainment law, were essential. In these areas as well as at the labels, black women made enormous strides. For example, Christina Norman was named the General Manager of the music television station VH1. Sharon Heyward became a senior vice president with the Trawick Group, an artist management and entertainment company, and Denise Brown-Noel founded her own firm, which specialized in entertainment law.

What the future holds for the music industry in America is anyone's guess. The Internet and MP3 technology are changing the rules yet again, and the major labels are struggling to keep up. Wherever American music goes, however, black women will not be left behind. As they have throughout history, they will help define the art. And if today's black women are any indication, they will finally also be paid for it.

See also Blues; Gospel Music; Hip Hop (Rap) Music; Jazz; and Rock and Roll.

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