In the Basement: Afro-Asian Teenage Female Alliances in Post-War America

“Where can you dance to any music you choose?” asks Sugar Pie DeSanto in her 1966 Chess recording with Etta James. Like many other pop and rhythm and blues songs of its era, “In the Basement” celebrates the sights and sounds of the city – only childhood girlfriends and cousins James and DeSanto do not celebrate the landscapes typical of city life, like the street or commercial districts. Instead, they sing about a place closer to home, one free of the age, class, and taste restrictions too often used to limit the mobility or question the authenticity of girls of color coming of age in cities during the postwar era.

Recorded nearly a decade after James and DeSanto were teenagers in San Francisco’s Fillmore District, “In the Basement” speaks to domestic spaces’ radical potential for interracial exchanges among African American and Filipina American girls, and is worth quoting at length:

Oh, now tell me where can you party, child, all-night long?
In the basement, down in the basement
Oh where can you go when your money gets low?
In the basement, whoa down in the basement
And if a storm is taking place, you can jam and still be safe
In the basement, down in the basement, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

Where can you dance to any music you choose?
In the basement, whoa down in the basement
Oh, you got the comforts of home, a nightclub too
In the basement, whoa down in the basement

Come on child, you can do it, you can do it, yeah

In the basement, that’s where it’s at (4x)
In the basement, in the basement, in the basement
That’s where it’s at

Where they don’t, where they don’t check your age at the door
In the basement, whoa down in the basement
Barracuda and jerk ’til your feet get sore
In the basement, whoa down in the basement
Do any dance you want to do, there’s no one under you
In the basement, I know it, you tell ’em oh-h-h I wanna go

In the basement, that’s where it’s at

As musicologist Jacqueline Warwick points out in Girl Groups, Girl Culture, “Girls’ musicking, like girl culture in a larger sense, has generally not revolved around the culture of the street or the call of the road.”¹ Even “tough” girls like James and DeSanto had curfews and parents to contend with, yet as the first generation of working-class African American and Filipina American women to experience a widespread youth culture in urban rather than rural areas, these girls transformed domestic spaces from sites of containment to laboratories of social and cultural experimentation where pleasure, rather than respectability, set the tone for interracial exchanges, alliances, and, ultimately, friendships that would persist well into adulthood.

By returning to the basement parties of their youth, James and DeSanto open a window into the important role that domestic and women-identified spaces played for a younger generation of female singers whose voices and concerns would come to shape a variety of postwar musical forms. In private spaces at home and in semi-public and public spaces at schools, churches, and community institutions, girls could rehearse personas and attitudes, get a feel for what bodies could do, and form intimate connections and solidarities across racial and ethnic lines. As solo artists, James and DeSanto drew from the distinctive values of the Afro-Asian youth culture they participated in to talk back to the restrictive cultural narratives and values of postwar popular culture and toward a politics that grants bodies agency and allows for the possibilities of gender and sexual self-determination.

Dancing in the Streets? Afro-Asian Teenage Girls and Social Life in the Bay Area

Contrary to Martha Reeves and the Vandellas’s 1965 hit for Motown Records, girls of color coming of age in cities in the post-World War II era were not exactly “Dancing in the Streets.” Parents, school officials, neighborhood gangs, age, respectability, and economics all restricted where girls of color could go, who they could be seen with, and in what kinds of activities they could participate. Nevertheless, girls of color who came of age in the postwar era enjoyed greater social freedoms and access to leisure time than any previous generation of African American or Asian American women. For African American girls, this shift was primarily due to the migration of African Americans out of the South and into cities in the North, Midwest, and West, which forever changed African American family dynamics and relationships.² Black girls continued to work at early ages to help support their families, yet as Marcia Chatelain in Southside Girls: Growing up in the Great Migration notes, “migration transformed them into shoppers and, more important, choosers.”³ Girls could choose styles of dress and adornment, as well as social groups and leisure activities in unprecedented ways. Among both second-generation Japanese American girls and second-generation Filipina American girls, those choices often created conflicts with immigrant parents.⁴ Despite the best efforts of parents, churches, community organizations, and schools to regulate and control how girls of color spent their leisure time, many formed social groups across racial and ethnic lines, organized non-commercial entertainment in the form of basement and house parties, and engaged with emerging rhythm and blues and rock and roll music. Through leisure activities, girls of color who came of age in the San Francisco Bay Area created an Afro-Asian working-class female youth culture.

Like many other young people of their generation, DeSanto and James were the children of migrants. DeSanto’s parents met in Philadelphia and migrated to San Francisco during World War II. James’s mother moved from Omaha, Nebraska, to Los Angeles to San Francisco when James was a teenager. The two girls lived around the corner from each other in the Fillmore District, which prior to the war was a predominately Japanese American neighborhood. When Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9906 in February 1942, Japanese Americans were designated enemy combatants and forced to relocate to internment camps, where they were held for the duration of the war.⁵ With only a week to pack their belongings before reporting to processing centers, many Japanese Americans were forced to sell their homes at lower prices, which allowed working-class black and Filipino families to buy them. These social displacements changed the Fillmore’s racial and ethnic makeup. During the 1940s, the Fillmore and its neighboring Western Addition became home to nearly 1,000 Filipinos and their families, making the area one of the largest Filipino communities in San Francisco.⁶

The Fillmore’s demographics mirrored DeSanto’s own mixed-race ancestry. She was born Umpeylia Marsema Balinton to a Filipino father and black mother. Her family spoke Tagalog at home, and DeSanto jokingly designated herself a “Spook-a-pina” in order to explain her mixed-race heritage to people who often saw her as a black woman.⁷ Non-white interracial coupling and intimate partnerships, like that between DeSanto’s parents, laid the foundations for others to come, and helped to naturalize Afro-Asian relations among young people whose culture would reflect them.⁸

The modest gains that workers of color made during World War II helped to establish racial and ethnic businesses within neighborhoods like the Fillmore. Black-owned nightclubs, record shops, and bookstores existed alongside Filipino/a-owned barbershops, restaurants, and lunch counters. Like Los Angeles’s Central Avenue or Detroit’s Hastings Street, the Fillmore was home to a vibrant postwar music scene and was labelled the “Harlem of the West.” DeSanto recalls that, as preteens, she and James would sneak out and listen to live music at nearby clubs: “Everyone would get dressed up in those days. The crowd was mixed, and for a while the police didn’t like it. They hassled us for a little while, but it stopped. We told the cops to leave us alone. We didn’t care about color, we cared about music.”⁹

In Spaces of Conflict, Sounds of Solidarity, historian Gaye Theresa Johnson develops the concept of “spatial entitlement” to explain how young people like DeSanto used new technology, creativity, and sonic spaces to construct new collectivities across racial and ethnic lines. These collectivities aimed to reclaim spaces under attack by state and federal policies prioritizing urban renewal and suburbanization. According to Johnson, “The challenge facing aggrieved racial groups was not simply to acquire new spaces for settlement, but to challenge the logic of racialized space itself – to transform spaces of surveillance, exploitation, and marginalization into sites of solidarity and self-activity.”¹⁰

Music was one way to challenge that logic. New technology lowered the cost of recording and allowed independent record labels to materialize that catered to working-class audiences’ tastes and cultural preferences.¹¹ Black-oriented radio stations and record stores promoted the new music from independent record labels, and expanded the reach of the regional musical styles emerging from urban neighborhoods and communities. Young people of color coming of age in the late 1940s and 1950s claimed this music as their own and used the growing infrastructure of independent record labels, deejays, and record stores to insert themselves into these broad cultural developments.

Neighborhood schools and religious institutions also reflected the Fillmore’s multiethnic composition by placing African, Filipino, Mexican, Spanish, and other Asian youths together in classes and extracurricular activities. During the postwar era, high school became universal, rather than an elite institution reserved for middle and upper-class students, causing many working-class students of color to spend more time with their peers in school than with their families and relatives. Furthermore, as Dawn Bohulano Mabalon highlights in her study of second-generation Filipino/a Americans in Stockton, California, many Filipino/a youth during the 1940s and 1950s began to “question the relevance of older ethnic institutions for younger Filipinas/os and demand more youth-centered activities.”¹² Many preferred dances, athletic clubs, and tournaments involving not just Filipino/a youth but also other young Asian ethnic groups living in and around Northern California. For instance, Filipino/a participation in the zoot suit youth culture of the 1940s, with its roots in African American youth culture, highlights a history of Afro-Asian alliances and affinities that predates the postwar era.

The street was a primary social arena, outside of the home and before school, where girls of color spent their leisure time. Given the tight living conditions in many urban areas, it was a welcome alternative to the cramped apartments and homes where girls of color lived with their parents and, in some cases, extended family members. Everyday musical play, such as in handclapping games, cheers, and double-dutch, featured in street social life. According to ethnomusicologist Kyra D. Gaunt, these forms of musical play teach girls oral-kinetic lessons about musical and social aesthetics specific to particular ethnic groups. Gaunt’s work focuses on how the games black girls play socialize them into musical blackness, but could also be used to think about how communal games and musical play allowed girls from other racial backgrounds or mixed-race backgrounds to learn musical blackness. In several interviews, DeSanto explains the important role her African American mother played in her early musical education. Alice Balinton, DeSanto’s mother, was a classically trained concert pianist and taught DeSanto how to sing by having her memorize Tin Pan Alley standards; DeSanto claims to have memorized over a hundred.¹³ This training allowed DeSanto to walk into any bar or club and tell other musicians what song she wanted them to play and in what key. However, blues music, as DeSanto explains, was not played in her household. Since she did not learn it at home, the games DeSanto played out on neighborhood streets with her African American peers might account for her familiarity with some of the dominant characteristics found in blues, like “the use of bent notes to inflect meaning, playful and dramatic call-and-response, … percussive and rhythmic complexity and improvisational tendencies of oral and kinetic expression.”¹⁴

As girls grew into their teenage years, their time on neighborhood streets became more restricted. Responsibilities at home increased and adults’ concerns about physical safety and teen pregnancy required girls to stay closer to home, where their activities and interactions could more easily be monitored. Involvement in extracurricular activities organized by schools, churches, and community organizations, like cheerleading, sports, band, or choir, also took older girls away from neighborhood streets, expanding their social circles and exposing them to different communities, cultural styles, and values. DeSanto remembers taking ballet lessons as a girl when her family could afford them, and as an adult she notes these lessons inform her dynamic and acrobatic live performances. When James lived in Los Angeles, her grandmother Mama Lu enrolled her in ballet lessons, drama lessons, and Campfire Girls. Although monitored by adults, access to and participation in extracurricular activities granted girls space within urban neighborhoods and communities to cultivate female friendships and peer groups based on shared interests and talents.

Around junior high, many girls began to form social clubs, gangs, or cliques among relatives and peers their age in order to better manage and control the changes occurring as they matured and came in contact with peers from outside their immediate surroundings. As the daughter of a working-class single mother, James’s home life was different than DeSanto’s, who had both parents at home and ten siblings. In her autobiography, Rage to Survive, James notes that losing her grandmother and, shortly afterward, moving with her mother from Los Angeles to San Francisco was a difficult transition.¹⁵ In San Francisco, James’s mother worked in order to ensure her family’s survival, which left James with more time alone to spend with her peers. James describes how she joined several girl gangs, which gave her a sense of belonging and safety in her new environment. One of the gangs she joined was the Lucky 20s, with DeSanto and DeSanto’s sister Francesca Balinton. As scholar Marie “Keta” Miranda notes in Homegirls in the Public Sphere, girls form gangs a little differently than their male counterparts and “create a culture based on each other, the activity of kickin’ it or hangin’ becomes the central focus of cultural production.”¹⁶ Much of what James remembers doing to join various girl gangs did not typically involve fights, drugs, or parties. Instead, she remembers hanging out, talking about boys, listening to records, swapping fashion tips, and harmonizing, activities which allowed her to develop trust and intimacy with other girls of color who shared similar values and interests.

Fashion was an important way for girls to articulate membership in a group. James describes her younger self as being a tomboy and the uniform for the Lucky 20s resonated with her sensibilities: “We wore baggy jeans, just like today, with the legs dragging on the ground. A white shirt was also part of our uniform – an oversize man’s shirt worn tails-out to cover your ass. Then you had your white socks rolled all the way down below your ankles and beat-up tennis shoes. I let my hair grow long and put it in a ponytail.”¹⁷ Even girls who would not consider the peer group they formed among friends to be a gang would dress alike when navigating public spaces, since a uniform “marked them powerfully and instantly as belonging together and may have made it difficult for any adult to prey on them individually.” Jackie Landry, who grew up in the Bronx, recalls how she and some girlfriends from Catholic school, all between 12 to 16 years old, wanted to travel from the Bronx to Manhattan to attend a rock show. By dressing alike in “white blouses with aqua skirts and bucks,” the girls were able to move more freely as unaccompanied minors within the public spaces and facilities typically controlled by white authorities and men of color.¹⁸

Harmonizing with friends was popular among many young people coming of age during the postwar era. DeSanto remembers harmonizing with James out on the building stoops where her family lived. For many girls, harmonizing with friends was a sign of maturity, both different than the handclapping, ring games, and double-dutch of preadolescent and adolescent girls and also less formal than church or school choir vocal training. James highlights this difference in her autobiography:

At school, I didn’t want to sing. I didn’t want to do most anything at school. But being in the glee club was mandatory. Well, I flat refused. Not sure why, except after I was pulled out of St. Paul Baptist Church I refused to sing when I didn’t feel like it. If I wanted to sing on streets with the kids, that was one thing. But formal singing, required singing in some silly glee club where I knew I’d wind up doing the solos – forget it.¹⁷

Knowledge of popular songs helped to create a common ground. Girls had a catalogue of work to draw from in order to articulate their own tastes and preferences and create bonds with those who shared them, regardless of their other differences. Participation in teenybopper culture via cheap commercial commodities like magazines, records, posters, and books accommodated the restrictions girls faced due to parental fears over their daughters’ safety on the streets. Girls could consume these cheap commodities at home or bring them to school to share with their girl friends.¹⁹ Lorraine Lo Faso, who was part of an all-woman vocal group in New York called the Socialites, remembers how “we would get the sheet music called Hit Parade, which we would pass around to everybody. They would sell the sheet music with all the words to all the songs and the songs lasted a long time. It wasn’t like now where you have a song and it’s over quickly. And we learned the words to all the songs, so it became a part of you. You just sang.”²⁰ Arlene Smith, who became the lead vocalist and songwriter for the all-woman group the Chantels, remembers: “We weren’t allowed to read True Confessions. But I used to buy the magazine with all the lyrics to the songs. I had loads of them. I was a Paper Doll person. A new book with a new song was almost as exciting as a record itself; we’d get together, learn it, and sing it.”²¹

Young girls’ desire to harmonize with friends at school conflicted with the expectations and sensibilities of school officials and instructors, many of whom perceived rhythm and blues music as a threat to white middle-class values and tastes. Landry and Sonia Goring of the Chantels remember being kicked out of choir practice at St. Anthony of Padua by their instructor Sister Marie Richards for singing what Richards referred to as “that skip ‘n’ jump stuff.”²² As punishment for harmonizing in gym class, the girls who would become the Shirelles, the first all-black female vocal group to earn a number one hit on the American pop charts with “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?,” were forced to perform in the school’s talent show.

Popular music scholars of postwar musical styles typically focus on how styles like doo-wop, rhythm and blues, and rock and roll emerged from public spaces like street corners, pool halls, bars, and parks, rather than from mixed-gender and woman-oriented spaces such as school buses, cafeterias, kitchen tables, beauty salons, and house parties.²³ Since male spaces are situated as the most authentic sites for emerging popular music cultures, the contributions women and girls make to that music are often ignored or considered less authentic. A growing body of work influenced by black feminist thought from scholars like Tricia Rose, Angela Davis, Hazel Carby, Kyra D. Gaunt, and Maureen Mahon has emerged within the past two decades to address the lack of critical attention paid to gender in scholarship on black popular music. The work of these scholars has helped to expose the male bias in much of popular music history and scholarship. They have highlighted the difference gender and race play in the kinds of spaces available to women and girls of color, along with the different values that inform the musical practices of women and girls of color. Just as many black feminists writing on a diverse range of popular music styles highlight how questions of authenticity operate to obscure the contributions of black women and girls, Kevin Fellezs’s work on Asian Americans in jazz and Oliver Wang work on Asian Americans in hip hop illustrate how issues around racial authenticity continue to obscure the important and historical contributions Asian Americans have made within these genres.²⁴ By shifting conversations away from authenticity, black feminists and Asian American scholars have made important interventions rendering the Afro-Asian alliances among women and girls within domestic spaces visible.

The domestic culture in working-class neighborhoods and communities of color during the postwar era differed from the domestic culture emerging in America’s largely white suburbs. Despite wartime gains, many women of color worked outside the home at rates higher than their white counterparts. Years of racist segregation limited where, when, and what African American and Filipino/a American consumers could buy or enjoy. Segregation along with discrimination made the home a primary site where black and Filipino friends and family could gather to enjoy music, listen to a baseball game on the radio, or talk about local politics.²⁵ As historian Dawn Mabalon points out in her work on Filipino/a families in Stockton, California, “‘family’ meant more than just the nuclear family, and Filipina/o Americans drew on the power of an extended family network to help them survive. Filipinas had a central role as the gatekeepers of the family network by shaping and controlling family boundaries.”²⁶

By 1952, records replaced sheet music as the primary source of income for the recording industry.²⁷ At about the same time, radio replaced jukeboxes as the primary vehicle through which hits were made. With recorded music moving into households in new and unprecedented ways, girls of color no longer had to go to dancehalls, bars, or clubs like their parents’ generation. Many Filipino men like DeSanto’s father might have been reluctant to allow their daughters to participate in the Fillmore’s popular music scene not just because they felt like this behavior was “unladylike,” but because they remembered the violence their generation experienced at taxi-dancehalls in the late 1920s and 1930s.²⁸ The emergence of black-oriented radio during the postwar era brought the world of rhythm and blues and rock and roll into girls’ living rooms.

Girls of color shared a special relationship with black-oriented radio, due in large part to the restrictions placed on their mobility and the radio’s central location in the home. While many parents probably assumed that their daughters were quietly listening and swooning over the likes of Sam Cooke, Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, or any of the other predominately male artists featured on the radio, many girls were actually busy calling into their local station and inserting themselves into the excitement. Beverly Lee of the Shirelles remembers: “We used to listen to a radio station called WWRL, which now does gospel, but then it was R&B. Our favorite was Tommy Smalls, known as Doctor Jive. I used to send in dedications because I loved hearing our names on the radio.”²⁹ Two black-oriented radio stations existed in the Bay Area: KSAN/1450 in San Francisco, and KDIA (KWBR) in Oakland. As in many cities, partnerships existed between the deejays of local black-oriented radio programs and nearby record shops selling jazz and rhythm and blues records. Young people eager to own the latest song they heard on the radio could purchase that record at a nearby shop. DeSanto remembers Melrose Records being the place in the Fillmore where she hung out and purchased records. Famous author Maya Angelou, who also spent her teen years in the Fillmore, worked as a cashier at the store.

Owning records and having a record collection became a necessity for girls interested in hosting a basement or house party, which, for many, functioned a lot like the juke-joints of their female blues predecessors. Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Clara Smith, and Rosa Henderson all reference basements in songs as sites free of the social pretensions used to divide people and reinforce problematic race and class hierarchies among music audiences in the 1920s.³⁰ Whether they were called “Grind ’em up Parties,” as Daphne Moss remembers, or “Jump Parties,” as Shirley Anderson recalls, girls of color were in a better position to set the mood and tone of the parties they hosted among peers who they invited into their home.³¹ Raynoma Gordy Singleton in her autobiography Berry, Me, and Motown describes how her mother constructed a “teenage pleasure palace” in the basement of their three-bedroom house on Blaine Street in Detroit: “Mama knew exactly what she was doing,” writes Singleton, “by fixing up the basement she was keeping us off the streets.”³² These parties emphasized the body and pleasure rather than reputation or status. While school dances often had dress codes and musical restrictions, basement parties like the ones that DeSanto and James remember attending had “everyone sweating and rubbing up against each other.”³³ In the documentary Examined Life, queer scholar Judith Butler talks with disabilities activist Sunaura Taylor about the challenge posed to Western ways of thinking about the body when asking, “What can a body do?” rather than, “What is a body?”³⁴ As Butler explains, “What can a body do?” does not isolate a set of capacities or morphologies; instead it is open-ended and allows for a range of possibilities. Basement parties allowed young girls of color to experiment with bodies and explore the range of possibilities open to them through the use of their voices, musical preferences, and romantic or sexual interests. “I was far from the first of my friends to lose my virginity,” writes James in Rage to Survive, “but I was experimenting by touching and being touched, getting a feeling for what bodies were all about.”³⁵ James’s openness to experimentation and wanting to get a “feeling for what bodies were all about” is a less prescriptive approach to thinking about human anatomy and sexuality.³⁶ The domestic sphere, and specifically the basement, was an alternative to the race, class, and gender hierarchies surrounding girls of color out on neighborhood streets and in public institutions, over which girls of color often had little control. Although this alternative space may not have been entirely free of social constraints or adult supervision, for girls of color the basement symbolized a space within urban neighborhoods and communities where they could prioritize their own pleasures and desires, and use them to connect across racial, ethnic, and class lines.

Conclusion

The interethnic youth culture girls of color created in domestic spaces and woman-identified spaces in the public sphere allowed them to rehearse personas and attitudes they would begin to take public by performing at local sock hops, amateur nights, and talent shows hosted by schools, community centers, record shops, and deejays from local black-oriented radio programs. DeSanto, who was a few years older than James, started to enter and win talent competitions in the Fillmore at Ellis Theater, while James formed a girl group called the Creolettes, a name that emphasized members’ mixed-race heritage, and began to perform at local sock hops. After signing with Modern Records, the Creolettes, which included DeSanto’s sister Francesca Balinton, who was also a member of the Lucky 20s, changed their name to Etta James and the Peaches and enjoy a series of hits with songs like “Roll with Me Henry (Wallflower),” “Tough Lover,” and “Good Rockin’ Daddy.” Maureen Mahon credits James with pioneering the tough-girl image used by other female rock and roll artists like the Ronettes and the Shangri-las: “Throughout her career,” writes Mahon, “[James] has joyfully been ‘raunchy’ in terms of subject matter and bodily movements, highlighting her sexuality and physical desires in a way that departs from proper mainstream femininity.”³⁷

Like James, DeSanto’s body of work frequently draws from values that existed in the Afro-Asian female youth culture she participated in with songs that emphasized what a body could do. DeSanto did not allow her petite size or Afro-Asian features to exclude her from the largely African American world of rhythm and blues. Instead, her music and stage persona critique the commercial aesthetic conventions that aimed to exclude her. For instance, in “Use What You Got” DeSanto highlights ways she does not fit into the normative African or European beauty standards of the era: “Well I see you looking baby / Do you dig what you see? / I bet you’re thinking there ain’t much of me / I ain’t got big hips, I’ve just got a little waist / And I ain’t thirty-eight no place.” In “Slip-in Mules (No High Heel Sneakers),” she responds directly to the requirements Tommy Tucker makes of his female companion in “Hi-Heel Sneakers”: to wear a red dress and high heels before going out for a night on the town. DeSanto sings that her red dress is at the cleaners and the high-heel sneakers he likes hurt her feet.

While DeSanto challenges male authority and patriarchal beauty standards with “Slip-in Mules (No High Heel Sneakers),” she does not minimize the importance of fashion and beauty for women and girls: In “Soulful Dress,” she revisits a theme she established early on in her career in “Use What You Got” by emphasizing how individual or personal style, in the form of a tight dress, can serve as a source of power and pleasure for women and girls of color.

By returning to the basement parties of their youth, James and DeSanto invite listeners into one of the central spaces where their Afro-Asian youth culture flourished. Through intimate encounters in domestic and female-identified spaces within urban neighborhoods and communities, black, Filipina, and mixed-race girls forged intercultural alliances around a common desire to have fun and break free from the restrictions that surrounded them. The inter-ethnic character of the female youth culture James and DeSanto participated in represents a departure from the literature on young people of color and especially girls of color growing up in the postwar era.

1. Jacqueline C. Warwick, Girl Groups, Girl Culture: Popular Music and Identity in the 1960s (New York: Routledge, 2008), 24. [↩]
2. Marcia Chatelain, South Side Girls: Growing up in the Great Migration (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 165. [↩]
3. Chatelain, South Side Girls, 169. [↩]
4. Dawn Bohulano Mabalon, Little Manila Is in the Heart: The Making of Filipina/o American Community in Stockton, California (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013); Valerie J. Matsumoto, City Girls: The Nisei Social World in Los Angeles, 1920–1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). [↩]
5. Shelley Sang-Hee Lee, A New History of Asian America (New York: Routledge, 2013), 215. [↩]
6. James Sobredo and Fred Basconcillo, “Fillmore Filipinos,” FoundSF, http://foundsf.org/index.php?title=Fillmore_filipinos. [↩]
7. George Lipsitz, Footsteps in the Dark: Hidden Histories (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 48. [↩]
8. Vivek Bald, Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013); Allison Varzally, Making a Non-white America: Californians Coloring Outside Ethnic Lines, 1925–1955 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). [↩]
9. Elizabeth Pepin, “Music of the Fillmore,” http://www.pbs.org/kqed/fillmore/learning/music/swing.html. [↩]
10. Gaye Theresa Johnson, Spaces of Conflict, Sounds of Solidarity: Music, Race, and Spatial Entitlement in Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 52. [↩]
11. George Lipsitz, Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990); Nelson George, The Death of Rhythm & Blues (New York: Penguin Books, 1988). [↩]
12. Mabalon, Little Manila, 181. [↩]
13. Sugar Pie DeSanto, “‘The Queen of the West Coast Blues’: Sugar Pie DeSanto Serves up Sweet & Spicy Stories,” interview, East Bay Yesterday, KPFA, June 28, 2017. [↩]
14. Kyra D. Gaunt, The Games Black Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from Double-Dutch to Hip Hop (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 58. [↩]
15. Etta James and David Ritz, Rage to Survive: The Etta James Story (New York: Da Capo Press, 1995), 36–7. [↩]
16. Marie “Keta” Miranda, Homegirls in the Public Sphere (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003), 98–9. [↩]
17. James and Ritz, Rage to Survive, 36. [↩] [↩]
18. John Clemente, Girl Groups: Fabulous Females that Rocked the World (Iola: Krause Publications, 2000), 43. [↩]
19. Angela McRobbie, Feminism and Youth Culture (New York: Routledge, 2000), 22. [↩]
20. Lorraine Lo Faso, interview with author, September 2006. [↩]
21. Charolette Grieg, Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow? Girl Groups from the 50s On (London: Virago Press, 1989), 14. [↩]
22. Clemente, Girl Groups, 43. [↩]
23. Charlie Gillett, The Sound of the City: The Rise of Rock and Roll (New York: Da Capo Press, 1996); Nelson George, The Death of Rhythm & Blues (New York: Penguin, 2004); Stuart L. Goosman, Group Harmony: The Black Urban Roots of Rhythm and Blues (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); Philip Groia, They All Sang on the Corner: A Second Look at New York City’s Rhythm and Blues Vocal Groups (New York: P. Dee Enterprises, 2005); Brian Ward, Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm and Blues, Black Consciousness and Race Relations (London: Routledge, 2004). [↩]
24. Mimi Thi Nguyen and Thuy Linh N. Tu, Alien Encounters: Popular Culture in Asian America (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007). [↩]
25. Farah Jasmine Griffiin, Who Set You Flowin’? The African American Migration Narrative (London: Oxford University Press, 1995). [↩]
26. Mabalon, Little Manila, 163. [↩]
27. Gaye Theresa Johnson, Spaces of Conflict, Sounds of Solidarity: Music, Race, and Spatial Entitlement in Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 49. [↩]
28. Shelley Sang-Hee Lee, A New History of Asian America (New York: Routledge, 2014), 136. [↩]
29. Greig, Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow, 34. [↩]
30. Sandra R. Lieb, Mother of the Blues: A Study of Ma Rainey (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1983), 146. [↩]
31. Daphne Moss, interview with the Bronx African American History Project, BAAHP Digital Archive at Fordham, April 19, 2005. [↩]
32. Raynoma G. Singleton, Berry, Me, and Motown: The Untold Story (Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1990), 13. [↩]
33. James and Ritz, Rage to Survive, 38. [↩]
34. Examined Life, directed by Astra Taylor (New York: Zeitgeist Films, 2010), DVD. [↩]
35. James and Ritz, Rage to Survive, 39. [↩]
36. Ibid., 27. [↩]
37. Maureen Mahon, “Rock,” in African American Music: An Introduction, by Mellonee V. Burnim and Portia K. Maultsby (New York: Routledge, 2015), 564. [↩]