You Don’t Own Me: A Selection of Queer Music Before Stonewall
In 2020, queerness abounds in pop music. Between artists like Janelle Monáe, Troye Sivan, Hayley Kiyoko, Dorian Electra, Conan Gray, Halsey, King Princess, and Frank Ocean, the musical landscape has never been more gorgeously rainbow, welcoming all shades of LGBT+ experience. But this radical, unapologetic queerness hasn’t come easily.
To appreciate the roots of modern queer pop, we must step back in time: before the 1969 riots at Stonewall Inn, before the explosion of the gay rights movement, when queer music was kept locked beneath ground, sequestered in smoky city lounges or hidden between the lines of showtunes. Though perhaps not as loud as what we know today, queerness has always been alive in music, hopeful and radiant and revolutionary and gentle. From the blues divas of the 1920s to the rock-and-roll renegades of the 1950s, queerness has sought out a place in every facet of musical history. In celebration of musicians past and present who pave the way forward by singing their truths, a selection of queer music as it existed in pre-Stonewall America…
THE TWENTIES: “Prove It On Me Blues” by Ma Rainey (1926)
Somewhere in the South in 1926, a woman named Gertrude Pridgett stood onstage and sang a song about loving other women. It was called “Prove It On Me Blues” and it went like this:
went out last night with a crowd of my friends
they must’ve been women, ‘cause I don’t like no men
it’s true I wear a collar and a tie
makes the wind blow all the while
don’t you say I do it, ain’t nobody caught me
you sure got to prove it on me
Nowadays that woman is remembered as Ma Rainey, legendary vocalist and mother of the blues. “Prove It On Me Blues” cracked open a gateway, giving the world a look into the hidden lesbian artistry, wit, and defiance of the blues music scene.
As Radclyffe Hall’s pioneering lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness underwent obscenity trials in both the U.S. and the U.K., blues divas like Ma Rainey were carving out a path for themselves, introducing queer storytelling into the tradition of “wild women” singing confessional tales of sex and longing. In an advertisement for “Prove It On Me Blues” printed in The Chicago Defender, Paramount featured a picture of Rainey herself dressed in a collar and tie, chatting up two women in dresses while a policeman watches from a distance. The ad’s text reads:
What’s all this? Scandal? Maybe so, but you wouldn’t have thought it of “Ma” Rainey. But look at that cop watching her! What does it all mean? But “Ma” just sings “Prove It on Me.”
Many of us hold preconceived notions of the gender politics of the early 20th century, and people like Ma Rainey are gleeful in shattering those notions in song and dress. Looking at the advertisement fills me with hope—and with pride for the heritage of queer music that existed long before the Stonewall riots.
THE THIRTIES: “Green Carnation” by Noel Coward (1933)
Despite the heterosexual love affair at the center of Noel Coward’s 1933 play Bitter Sweet, slipped in its folds like an unkept secret is “Green Carnation,” a comedy song about the sartorial choices of gay men in London and Paris during the 1890s.
Although he was closeted for all of his career, “Green Carnation” is an unmistakable nod to the queer sensibility present throughout Coward’s work. While Bitter Sweet’s central plot involves a young woman who elopes with her male music teacher, “Green Carnation” features the heterosexual leads performing a slice of hidden queer history.
The title of the song is filched from Oscar Wilde, the gay playwright known for habitually wearing a green carnation in his lapel. In time, the green carnation was adopted by gay men throughout Europe to flag their sexuality to others. In an era where queerness was criminalized in England, the green carnation was a badge of honor, a lighthouse, a path to finding family despite the forced and looming silence.
While “Green Carnation” is a lighthearted tune that mocks the ways of nineteenth-century dandies like Oscar Wilde, the early twentieth century proved no more welcoming to homosexuality. “Green Carnation” was performed in stage productions of Bitter Sweet, but the song was axed from both film productions of the play. The only discernible reason was that it was a touch too truthful, a touch too obvious in its reference to queer culture.
This subtle yet insidious erasure does have a silver lining: it allows unique insight into the ways that queerness seeped into popular culture in real time. Gay musicians like Coward may have lived in a pre-Stonewall, pre-Civil Rights Movement world, a world where they surely must have felt alone without fellow queer people as personal and artistic support systems—but even this couldn’t stop them from referencing cultural heroes like Oscar Wilde in their work.
THE FORTIES: “How ‘Bout That Jive” by the International Sweethearts of Rhythm (1945)
As the first fully-integrated, all-female big band in the United States, the International Sweethearts of Rhythm would have already secured their spot in the history books without hiring Tiny Davis to front the band. But hire Tiny they did, and so their story became interlaced with the winding lineage of queer music.
Ernestine “Tiny” Davis was a trumpeter and vocalist from Memphis, Tennessee. Once dubbed “the female Louis Armstrong,” Tiny was also an out lesbian and the star of the International Sweethearts, a 16-piece jazz band that rose to fame in the 1940s. Although the Sweethearts gained enormous clout among feminists and musicologists during the 1970s, the contributions of their leading lady Tiny have mostly been overlooked.
Commanding audiences across the world in her suit jacket and vest (a get-up, incidentally, not too far off from Ma Rainey’s), Tiny led the Sweethearts on their first ever USO tour, where they performed for U.S. military personnel throughout France and Germany. The tour came about in response to a letter-writing campaign organized by Black servicemen, who demanded the Sweethearts be added to the USO roster. When the military relented, many of the band’s members became the first Black women ever to travel with the USO. One of their few recorded performances features a hit from the tour called “How ‘Bout That Jive.”
After returning to the home front under Tiny’s leadership, the Sweethearts continued to make headlines in New York, Chicago, and beyond. After one show at the Regal Theater, The Chicago Defender declared their performance “one of the hottest stage shows that ever raised the roof of the theater!”.
But not long after Tiny left the band in 1946, the Sweethearts unraveled and disbanded. For her part, Tiny continued to work as a musician with a new band called the Hell Divers. Along with her partner Ruby, she also founded, owned, and operated a famous lesbian night club in Chicago called—fittingly enough—Tiny & Ruby’s Gay Spot.
Tiny’s success both in and beyond her career with the Sweethearts is testament to the far-ranging history of queer music—and the indelible role that lesbians of color have played in it. Before the Freddie Mercurys or Elton Johns of the world ever stormed the stage, there existed a woman named Tiny Davis and her queer, feminist, groundbreaking jazz band.
THE FIFTIES: “Tutti Frutti” by Little Richard (1955)
First recorded in 1955, “Tutti Frutti” launched the career of rock-and-roll juggernaut Little Richard. Once heralded as “the sound of the birth of rock-and-roll,” the original lyrics of “Tutti Frutti” contain unmistakable descriptions of gay sex. Along with its infamous refrain of “a-wop-bop-a-loo-bop-a-wop-bam-boom!” (Richard’s verbal depiction of a drum pattern), the original version of the song included the lyrics:
Tutti Frutti, good booty
if it don’t fit, don't force it
you can grease it, make it easy
This version of “Tutti Frutti” was born in the Southern nightclubs where Little Richard performed in the early days of his career. Legend has it that the song’s frenetic energy and sexual innuendo were inspired by Esquerita, a gay New Orleans performer who Little Richard met at a bus station. Whatever its true origins, “Tutti Frutti” was eventually stripped of sex and rewritten for studio recording; at the behest of producer Bumps Blackwell and with the help of lyricist Dorothy LaBostrie, the new lyrics simply read:
Tutti Frutti, aw rooty
Tutti Frutti, aw rooty
At the time, “aw rooty” was slang for “all right.” In this new, clean edit, “Tutti Frutti” rose to No. 2 on the Billboard pop music charts and catapulted Little Richard into a household name. The defanging of the song was emblematic of Richard’s relationship with his own identity, which saw him proudly claim and later denounce homosexuality. In the 1950s in the early stages of his career, Richard identified as gay, performed as a drag act, and was known throughout the music scene for his wildly extravagant house parties.
But in 1957, Little Richard glimpsed the Sputnik satellite returning to Earth in the middle of a concert in Sydney, Australia. Believing this beam of light to be a sign from God, he vowed to give up his life of sin and return to the Old Testament religiosity of his childhood. While none of us can really understand the emotional truth behind Little Richard’s journey with his sexuality, the history of “Tutti Frutti” offers us an idea of his beginnings on the club circuit, and sheds light on how gay culture created the rock-and-roll we know today.
THE SIXTIES: “You Don’t Own Me” by Lesley Gore (1963)
Now viewed by many as a feminist anthem, Lesley Gore was only 17 when she first recorded “You Don’t Own Me.” Released in 1963, on the eve of the women’s rights movement that took hold in the 1970s, many music historians have cited this and other girl group music of the ‘60s as a catalyst for what would eventually become a feminist uprising.
Now included in the Grammy Hall of Fame, the lyrics of “You Don’t Own Me” see Gore scolding an imagined boyfriend, singing:
you don’t own me
I’m not just one of your many toys
you don’t own me
don’t say I can’t go with other boys
and don’t tell me what to do
don’t tell me what to say
and please, when I go out with you
don’t put me on display
The song was a raucous success, hitting No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 (with the only thing standing in its way of No. 1 being the classic Beatles tune “I Want to Hold Your Hand”). For many young women of the day, it was a call for defiance, a call to revolution. That call has stood the test of time: throughout the years, female artists from Dusty Springfield to Joan Jett to Grace have released covers of “You Don’t Own Me.”
In 2010, Gore gave an interview in which she looked back at her greatest hits. About “You Don’t Own Me” she remarked: “As I got older, feminism became more a part of my life and more a part of our whole awareness, and I could see why people would use it as a feminist anthem. I don’t care what age you are—whether you’re 16 or 116—there’s nothing more wonderful than standing on the stage and shaking your finger and singing, ‘Don’t tell me what to do.’”
Despite the implication of a heterosexual relationship within the song itself, Lesley Gore came out as a lesbian in 2004. Although she had long since retired from the pop spotlight and taken up a career as a composer, the revelation of Gore’s sexuality injected new meaning into the anthem of her youth. Once known as “the queen of teen angst” and “the teenage voice of heartbreak,” Gore just as quickly became a queer icon, and her discography shifted into a celebration of lesbian artistry in pop music as well as lesbian power in the world of feminist politics.
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The fate of these artists and their catalogs may differ, but one thread unites them all: courage. While Tiny Davis has been lost to history, Little Richard is widely celebrated as the architect of rock and roll; while most people have never heard of “Prove it On Me Blues,” “You Don’t Own Me” has been featured in everything from episodes of American Horror Story to Toyota car commercials.
But whether they are erased or adored, forgotten or commercialized, the fact remains that each of these artists made history in every moment they spent onstage. Even with the treasure trove of queer music at our disposal in the year 2020, we remain here, seeking and studying, reaching for the musical history that’s been hidden from us. If we are to fully appreciate the queer artists making waves today, we must first acknowledge the family tree they bloom from. It’s time to give pre-Stonewall LGBT+ musicians their roses—or, as the case may be, their green carnations.