20 Feet from Stardom: The Untold Stories of African-American Backup Singers

The 2013 documentary, 20 Feet from Stardom follows the once untold stories of the African-American background singers that helped The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, David Bowie, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and dozens of other classic rock artists rise to fame during the 1960s Civil Rights Movement and beyond. Yet, not unlike other occupations in which the hegemony is recognized most often for their achievements, these women seldom reaped the benefits of rock star life even though many of them were close friends with their hegemonic counterparts who were privileged enough to experience them in their entirety. Given the normality of this intersectional divide of benefits along the lines of race and gender, it is not surprising that the entertainment media would only become interested in these women’s stories as a piece of history long after they occurred. Perhaps now, despite the ongoing fight against inequality in the U.S., Americans have come to appreciate the foundation upon which their favorite rock band’s hit records were built.

Part of what makes 20 Feet from Stardom such a powerful media text is its unique representation of African-American women as the crux of hegemonic success in a time when American culture was mostly defined by those in power. Although Civil Rights activists like Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcom X were major players in the counterculture at the time and therefore gained a significant amount of (controversial) publicity in the news media, still hegemonic members claimed credit for much of what was going on in the world of entertainment while the “other,” yet equally gifted intersectional members of society fell by the wayside. Yet the normative mentality of hegemonic success being dependent only on hegemonic actions is challenged through background singer Merry Clayton’s assertion that white male singers couldn’t do anything without sheet music in front of their faces and therefore depended on the African-American women’s expressive vocals and movement to strengthen the quality of their music. In Clayton’s words, the African-American women’s voices “saved rock ‘n roll” because they provided the intensity and freedom of reign that was required to send such a powerful message as “Rape, murder, it’s just a shot away.”

Although African-American women viewed their contributions to classic rock as a God-given ability that stemmed from a culture of worship and was therefore irreplaceable by the hegemony, many of those hegemonic members tended to see them as little more than colorful, promiscuous embellishments on an otherwise pasty stage. This is mentioned in the documentary by several of the African-American women, as they recall sometimes being portrayed as little more than a provocative sex symbol to an onlooking crowd. Most obviously, this discrepancy was caused by the hegemonic producers’ enforcement of a dress code for the dancers, which consisted primarily of short, tight dresses that revealed the women’s underwear if they weren’t careful onstage. In her article, “Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance,” Bell Hooks discusses the social phenomenon of “othering” the African-American women as some kind of primitive sexual being that is somehow less respectable than white women and is therefore more apt to being the object of unthinkable hegemonic fantasies. Due partly to the historic jezebel stereotype, among other degrading ideas about African-American women in relation to white men, these women’s worth and musical accomplishments were seldom publicly appreciated without some mention of the hegemony that “made it possible.” As Herbert Marcuse states in One-Dimensional Man, “Today the ideology is in the process of production itself,” meaning that the ideology regarding what is “normal” and socially acceptable is, and will always be, on a continuum of change that is congruent with the shift in power from the hegemony to its challenging counterparts until there is nothing left to challenge (pg. 11).