Black Girls Play

Infusing various research techniques and musicology, Kyra D. Gaunt seamlessly voyages through a myriad of ethnographic methodologies in her monograph, The Games Black Girls Play. Drawing from her arsenal of experiences as an African American woman, singer, student, dancer and scholar, she powerfully asserts that the games that black girls play is the nucleus of black musical identities and sensibilities, which are also essential to the origins of black popular music and cultural production. The array of analytical practices employed throughout the book serve as the central investigative locus in determining the potency of the data Gaunt collected and its relevance to understanding music from the African diaspora.
Spanning an eight-year period, …show more content…
Participating as both an insider and outsider allowed for multiple examinations into the world of black girl play songs from cultural natives as well as an outsider that can detail the experience from an objective position. The inside voices needed to be heard considering that a huge part of the author’s motivation for writing the book was due to the silencing of black girls contributions to black music. Furthermore, musical analysis and historical research were needed in order to detail the continuity of musical blackness and the way that black musical structure and creation are embodied and gendered across locales that are synergistic in the formation of black music by the fragmented African diaspora. These methods proved to be valuable due to the author blending numerous ways to conduct research to create a monograph that further develops our understanding of the progression of black popular music and …show more content…
However, there is a significant amount of musical analysis in relation to the games as embodied musical performances and styles. Using her training as a musical scholar, the author decontextualizes the songs and chants from their social and cultural milieu to cross-reference and relate the interdependences that black popular music have on game-songs created by black girls. Additionally, her experiences as a vocalist and music creator helped to evaluate the similarities in musical forms and construction by relating the game-songs to multiple styles of black popular music including Hip Hop, R&B and soul music that employ heavily syncopated beats, music sampling and rhythmic timbral patterns in tandem. Throughout the text, the author also reveals her own personal relationship as a self-appointed fan and consumer of black popular music that legitimized her role as an ethnographer specifically when she conducted participant observation as a double dutch rope jumper. Her familiarity with the music being played as she jumped rope alongside other African American women allowed the author to cross into an insider position to objectively observe while intuitively interpreting her own experiences simultaneously during the music space time of musical engagement and