Six months before she would become the first Black woman nominated for album of the year at the premiere Grammy ceremony in 1959, the jazz great Ella Fitzgerald was loose, candid and confident about her relationship to craft.
“I’m feeling so good these days, so ambitious,” she said in a November 1958 interview with the critic Ralph Gleason. And who could blame her? At that point, the much-beloved “first lady of song” was renowned as a formidable musician capable of wedding dulcet melody with Olympian improvisational techniques. And in the late ’50s, Fitzgerald had made a gutsy pivot: Her nomination came for the double album “Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Irving Berlin Songbook,” an entry in a series with the producer Norman Granz. Starting with a collection of Cole Porter songs, these were major excavations into the nature of American culture itself.
“The Irving Berlin Songbook” was a swoony, assured set where Fitzgerald yet again used the album format to effectively invite herself to the ball, wedging her way into a world of standards evocative of midcentury racial and class homogeneity. She lost to Henry Mancini’s “The Music From Peter Gunn” soundtrack. All her fellow nominees were white men.
A 14-year drought for Black women album of the year nominees ensued, which lasted until the 1974 awards, where Roberta Flack received a nod for the ravishing “Killing Me Softly.” But a Black woman wouldn’t win this trophy for two more decades — not until 1992, when Natalie Cole was honored for her crisp and elegant conversation with the legacy of her father, Nat King Cole, on “Unforgettable … With Love.” That means no Supremes, no Dionne Warwick, no Aretha Franklin, no Diana Ross or even Donna Summer during the first fever-pitch high of her disco superstardom (though her “Bad Girls” album broke another no-nomination dry spell in 1980).
On Sunday, Beyoncé will compete for the award for the fifth time, for “Cowboy Carter,” an album of audacious multigenre reach that includes meditations on, among other things, Jim Crow’s cultural arm in the recording industry. If she triumphs over André 3000, Sabrina Carpenter, Charli XCX, Jacob Collier, Billie Eilish, Chappell Roan and Taylor Swift, she will become just the fourth Black woman to win the category. Following Cole, only Whitney Houston (1994) and Lauryn Hill (1999) have taken home the show’s top prize.
The absence of Black women in this circle of recognition is especially striking considering the enormous impact they have had on pop music history — from the blues singers of the 1920s to iconoclasts like Nina Simone and Grace Jones to big voices like Tina Turner, Patti LaBelle and Mariah Carey to dazzling phenoms like Janet Jackson and Rihanna who helped define global pop stardom, to name just a few.
In recent years, the Grammys faced criticism for its failures to award women in its biggest, all-genre categories, yet from the 2010s forward, album of year has become something of an oasis where women nominees have flourished, mirroring their dominance on the charts. Wins by Kacey Musgraves, Billie Eilish, Adele and Taylor Swift are significant, but they also highlight the absence of Black women taking home the prize this century. (As the journalist Danyel Smith noted in an interview, Adele won as many Grammys at the 2012 ceremony, held the night after Whitney Houston died, as “Whitney had won in the entirety of her career.”)
In a cruel irony, Beyoncé holds the record for most Grammys won by any artist, with 32; this year, she has the most nominations, with 11. Her repeated losses in album of the year for grand endeavors like “Beyoncé,” “Lemonade” and “Renaissance” have been the subject of numerous debates and a fair amount of head-scratching. But it’s worth considering what it is about this particular category that remains so unattainable for her, and Black women recording artists more broadly.
In its initial heyday, the “long playing” collection of recorded songs held the potential to convey an artist’s sweeping vision. Not long after Fitzgerald released her last entry in the “Songbook” series in 1964, the Beatles famously forged deeper and deeper into a period of studio experimentation resulting in classics like “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” one of the first and most influential rock ’n’ roll concept albums. The expanding field of rock criticism’s recognition of works like the Beach Boys’ “Pet Sounds,” Bob Dylan’s “Blonde on Blonde” and the Rolling Stones’ “Exile on Main St.” fueled perceptions of the concept album as a decidedly white man’s world, though only the Beatles took home a Grammy, for “Sgt. Pepper.”
Stevie Wonder’s historic run of multiple album of the year wins in the 1970s, for his sprawling sonic and lyrical artistic statements about Black life in the post-Civil Rights era, were barrier-breaking rejoinders to that history of marginalization. Black women have not fared as well. One theory is that they are so often perceived as mere vocalists and interpreters (as opposed to multidimensional artists) or as conduits of joy, pain and catharsis, muses who are called upon to soothe, “heal” and sing the nation through times of crisis and change, as the scholar Farah Griffin argues in “When Malindy Sings: A Meditation on Black Women’s Vocality.”
But Black women have a long history of epic creation and storytelling, especially in our contemporary era. Take the literary lioness Toni Morrison’s masterworks “Song of Solomon” and “Beloved,” or the artist Kara Walker’s large-scale silhouettes of slavery and her massive installation “A Subtlety”; think of the dramatist Suzan-Lori Parks’s plays “Father Comes Home From the War, Parts 1, 2 & 3”; consider the reach of Ava Duvernay’s cinematic and television efforts “Selma,” “When They See Us” and “Origin”; recall the photographer Carrie Mae Weems’s roving body of work, or the director Julie Dash’s classic independent film “Daughters of the Dust,” a multigenerational tale from 1991 that was reintroduced into the popular imagination in 2016, when it served as an inspiration for Beyoncé’s “Lemonade.”
Cole’s moment in 1992 marked the culmination of a year in which “Unforgettable … With Love” had dominated radio with its studious, retro rendering of her father’s lush midcentury pop. “She came from a showbiz family,” Smith said, and “a tradition that was legible” to the Grammys. Her climb back from addiction was well-known, and the makings of what Smith called a “redemption story” were in the works.
Houston was a three-time album of the year nominee in 1994, when she was riding the blockbuster success of the film “The Bodyguard” and its accompanying album. It is the best-selling soundtrack of all time, the best-selling album by a woman in music history and the best-selling album of that decade. In other words, it was too big to fail.
Hill’s win in 1999 was something different: a victory lap for her critically adored, chart-topping “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill.” It was a concept album of enormous spiritual gravitas and emotional intimacy that showcased her riveting songwriting, deft rapping and a neo-soul sound that harked back to Wonder’s golden era.
Since the year 2000, more and more Black women have been nominees for album of the year: India.Arie, Missy Elliott, Alicia Keys, Mariah Carey, Rihanna, Janelle Monáe, Cardi B, H.E.R., Lizzo, Doja Cat, SZA and Mary J. Blige. But it’s Beyoncé’s appearances in this category — beginning with “I Am … Sasha Fierce” (2010) — that have garnered the most headlines. The tension between the evolving, colossal ambition and innovation of her nominated releases, their critical acclaim and their global popularity, set against the Grammy voters’ repeated unwillingness to reward these efforts, has amounted to the greatest ongoing Grammy drama: “Will she or won’t she win this year?”
Beyoncé’s self-titled album was a cultural sensation, replete with unexpected forays into alternative R&B. Its out-of-nowhere arrival inaugurated the era of the “surprise” album drop. It was released with videos for each song, introducing the modern visual album. And it included the sampled speech of a feminist intellectual, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, expounding on gender equality. At the 2013 Grammys, it lost to “Morning Phase,” a moody album from the alt-rock shape-shifter Beck.
The defeat did nothing to lessen her experimental boundary pushing. The 2016 magnum opus “Lemonade,” Beyoncé’s second visual album, turned a personal tale of domestic strife and wounded intimacies into a reckoning with slavery’s legacies, the fracturing of families and communities, the lingering effects of Black grief and mourning and the specifically acute ordeals facing Black women in American culture. It encompassed spoken-word poetry, archival voices, provocative samples and a visual vocabulary that yoked together allusions to iconic Black feminist art — the cinema of Dash, the photography of Weems — as well as scenes shot on former plantation sites and visions of post-Katrina New Orleans.
“Lemonade” took the idea of the concept album and stretched it to its multi-formalistic limits, absorbing the tradition of Black women’s epics and becoming a sonic “vehicle,” as Griffin said in an interview, for “Black women’s epics” from multiple genres, “not just music but literary and visual ones as well.” The album was such a phenomenon that it spawned scholarly articles as well as a critical anthology, and it remains a staple on Black cultural studies syllabuses. Grammy voters were less bowled over, awarding album of the year to a visibly shocked Adele.
Six years later, Beyoncé made another album-length dissertation: a luminous homage to queer Black and brown dance music resulting in her disco fantasia “Renaissance.” Without accompanying visuals, “Renaissance” accrued its density through a seamless fusion of subgenres and tributes to L.G.B.T. innovators of the form, proudly wearing its ardent connections to towering Black women innovators (including Jones, who appears on the record, and Summer, whose influence drives the album’s swirling climax). Many assumed the LP, which arrived to critical raves in 2022, would break Beyoncé’s album of the year stalemate. She lost to Harry Styles’s ’80s throwback “Harry’s House.”
With “Cowboy Carter,” Beyoncé has faced off with the storied genre of country music, long known for the (barely) invisible fences around it. But rather than bothering to try and break in, the LP is its own country entirely. Its songs wrestle with myths about Blackness and the culture of southern America, wrangling together the sounds and aesthetics that speak to Beyoncé (hip-hop, R&B, funk, zydeco, opera, early rock ’n’ roll a-go-go). It pitches a wide tent that’s bustling with dynamic collaborations forged between Beyoncé and important pioneers, game allies and rising talents.
If “Cowboy Carter” wins, it would be for a work that, perhaps more than any of her other releases, effectively summons the ghost of gutsy Ella. As the Fitzgerald biographer Judith Tick argued in an email, the “Songbook” releases were akin to “a Modern Library project,” with “intellectual” scale and heft and “the imprimatur of ‘classic’” attached to them. They were the platforms by which a Black woman artist demonstrated her mastery of a storied canon infused with romance and grandeur. By daring to make these albums at all, Fitzgerald was using the form to tell America something about itself — a move that some of our most celebrated artists (Dylan, Wonder) have made with the Grammys’ approval.
A Beyoncé victory would reward a Black woman musician for giving the nation its own colorful and complicated story back again, with a powerhouse impresario in charge of how that story gets told.
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