Music can be used to understand and communicate about social justice as it relates to food, agriculture, and the environment. Music can open the door for deeper understandings of inequity and justice in ways that step away from Eurocentric insistence on linear and written communication to teach, exchange knowledge, or debate. This event will explore these modes of understanding and resistance through a multi-media discussion of Lynnée Denise’s 2023 book Why Willie Mae Thornton Matters (University of Texas Press).

“Born in Alabama in 1926, raised in the church, appropriated by white performers, buried in an indigent’s grave—Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton's life events epitomize the blues—but Lynnée Denise pushes past the stereotypes to read Thornton’s life through a Black, queer, feminist lens and reveal an artist who was an innovator across her four-decade-long career.

Why Willie Mae Thornton Matters “samples” elements of Thornton’s art—and, occasionally, the author’s own story—to create “a biography in essays” that explores the life of its subject as a DJ might dig through a crate of records. Denise connects Thornton’s vaudevillesque performances in Sammy Green’s Hot Harlem Revue to the vocal improvisations that made “Hound Dog” a hit for Peacock Records (and later for Elvis Presley), injecting music criticism into what’s often framed as a cautionary tale of record-industry racism. 

She interprets Thornton’s performing in men’s suits as both a sly, Little Richard–like queering of the Chitlin Circuit and a simple preference for pants over dresses that didn’t have a pocket for her harmonica. Most radical of all, she refers to her subject by her given name rather than "Big Mama," a nickname bestowed upon her by a white man. It's a deliberate and crucial act of reclamation because in the name of Willie Mae Thornton is the sound of Black musical resilience.”

The Food Studies Program, The Tishman Environment and Design Center, and the Food and Social Justice Action Research Lab (FJAR)  at The New School are honored to present this multi-media panel event featuring author, sound practitioner, and DJ Lynnée Denise; artist, curator, mother, and producer Elissa Blount Moorhead; and Assistant Professor of Race and Media in the School of Media Studies at The New School Dr. Brittnay Proctor-Habil. The event is part of the Food Studies Program’s “Food, Foraging, and Social Justice” series and The New School’s Earth Month activities. It is also co-sponsored by the SexTech Lab and the Gender and Sexualities Studies Institute at The New School.

It will be moderated by Mike Harrington, Director of Sustainability Engagement at the Tishman Environment and Design Center, and Dr. Kristin Reynolds, Chair of Food Studies and Director of the FJAR Lab at The New School. Please join us online for a video feature, musical samples, and a discussion of this important work!

The book, Why Willie Mae Thornton Matters, may be purchased online through the University of Texas Press.