Editor's introduction.

Late in the summer of 2006, a conversation took place at the Center for Black Music Research concerning future CBMR initiatives. At one point, interim executive director Samuel A. Floyd Jr. paused to reflect, somewhat ruefully, that when he founded the CBMR in the early 1980s, he anticipated that it would have a finite life span. Its programs and publications having fostered a well-established and wide-ranging engagement with black music by the larger community of scholars, it would have fulfilled its mission and thus would have, in effect, put itself out of business.

Similar expectations may have been held by the pioneering scholars of women in music: preliminary studies would lead inevitably to extensive and continuing inquiry. But, as with studies of black music, those of women's contributions to the cultivation of musical traditions have yet to become well established or wide ranging, despite compelling evidence that an understanding of those traditions is incomplete without considering women's essential roles. Nowhere is this more true than in the context of musical traditions of African ancestry. Moreover, although Black Music Research Journal has published individual studies of women in music, this is the first issue dedicated to the contributions of women. As the title of this issue suggests, the articles consider from diverse perspectives the significant role of women in the cultivation of a variety of black music from the late-nineteenth to the early twenty-first century.

Helen Walker-Hill's study of the music department of Western University, located near Kansas City, examines the accomplishments of several of the institution's women faculty and three of its alumnae: Eva Jessye, Nora Douglas Holt, and Etta Moten. Walker-Hill shows how, at the beginning of the last century, Western University was informed by Booker T. Washington's belief in the uplifting of African Americans through vocational education and the subsequent use of those skills in the workplace. Noteworthy is the fact that the careers of Jessye, Holt, and Moten may be seen as exemplifying the virtues of Washington's philosophy: each made important contributions to American musical life through the use of talents initially cultivated during her years at Western University.

While these women's lives might be seen as reflecting the power of the movement to uplift the race, the early career of Shirley Graham came to exemplify the other major school of thought concerning the place of African Americans within a fundamentally indifferent, when not overtly hostile, society: that of W.E.B. DuBois with its call for education beyond the purely vocational, aggressive political action to secure Constitutional rights, and the cultivation of a core group of leaders within African America (the Talented Tenth) to secure those rights for, and thereby empower, the rest of the black population. Throughout much of her life, Graham was politically energized. Important events included a series of trips to Paris where she immersed herself in the intellectual and cultural life of expatriate Africans and African Americans, study at the Oberlin Conservatory, and the composition and performance in 1932 of a three-act opera titled Tom Tom: An Epic of Music and the Negro, apparently the first opera composed by an African-American woman.

Sarah Schmalenberger's critical examination of this work and of Graham's career and ideology reveals Graham to have been a cosmopolitan individual animated with a strong sense of social justice and an equally strong conviction that she was called upon to act publically on those beliefs. Schmalenberger discusses the opera not only as a musical composition but also as a medium through which Graham examined the double consciousness of African American life, first articulated in 1903 by W.E.B. DuBois in The Souls of Black Folk. As the title of her study suggests, Schmalenberger argues that Tom Tom is best understood as marking the beginning of Graham's overt political activism on behalf of black unity.

When one considers that Washington's vision of politically passive uplift in anticipation of greater inclusion within American society and DuBois's creed of activism to secure rights and opportunities already promised were articulated within just a few years of one another, it is not surprising that the lives recounted in the first two articles in this issue reflect more or less concurrent engagement with elements of these two philosophies. The study of MeShell Ndegeocello by Nghana Lewis shifts our attention to the present day and to another issue: the place and image of women in black society as reflected in both the words and the performance of hip hop.

Lewis not only introduces a current hip hop artist but also examines closely the messages of resistence to, in the words of Tricia Rose (1994, 100-101), a pioneer in studies of hip hop, "institutions and groups that symbolically, ideologically, and materially oppress African Americans," embedded within Ndegeocello's compositions. Lewis surveys Ndegeocello's career and then focuses on her fourth album, Cookie: The Anthropological Mixtape (2002). Lewis considers Ndegeocello's challenge of the misogynistic images of black women, which are characteristic of numerous rap compositions today; she also examines Ndegeocello's ambivalence regarding the male-dominated hip hop music industry. In sum, Lewis argues that the entire album confronts the prevailing image of black women found in the work of male hip hop artists who have constituted the music's mainstream during much of its thirty-year history by presenting "the complex range of emotions and experiences that extend from living in a black woman's body." If early rap drew listeners' attention to the horrific reality of inner-city African-American youth following the disintegration of black urban communities during the course of the 1970s and thereafter, Ndegeocello's Cookie: The Anthropological Mixtape seeks to raise the collective consciousness concerning the lives of black women today.

Tammy Kernodle's study of women in contemporary black gospel music directs our attention to developments in this music since 1969, the year that the Northern California Youth Choir recorded "Oh Happy Day" in an arrangement by the group's pianist, Edwin Hawkins. Since then, Kernodle argues, women have defined the evolving "performance aesthetic" and have provided the "signature sounds" of this music. If 1969 marked the debut of contemporary gospel, it was in the years 1984 and 1995 that further fundamental changes in style took place, marking in each instance a revised definition of the "contemporary." Kernodle shows that contemporary gospel music over the past thirty-five years has undergone dramatic stylistic evolution and experienced enormous growth in popularity. At the same time, it has been continuously scrutinized for possible transgressions of style and taste as defined by the more traditional-minded members of those denominations who regard this music as their own. She also shows that it has been the women soloists who have been in the forefront of change and thus have often attracted the most adverse attention at crucial points in its evolution.

The subject of this issue is obviously not exhausted by these four articles. The contents of each should invite readers' reflections and encourage further critical engagement by scholars. Just as the mission of the CBMR represents as-yet-unfinished business, so too the study of women in black music remains incomplete.

REFERENCES

Rose, Tricia. 1994. Black noise: Rap music and black culture in contemporary America. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press.