National Council on Public History

PROPOSAL TYPE

Roundtable

SEEKING

• Seeking General Feedback and Interest
• Seeking Specific Expertise

RELATED TOPICS

• Archives
• Public Engagement
• Music and Audio Documentary

ABSTRACT

The ROSETTA CIRCLE is a singing collective of care celebrating our unsung foremothers of jazz and blues as archived by Rosetta Records.

Feminist pioneer and jazz historian Rosetta Rietz created a record label dedicated to the women of early jazz and blues. Scouring music history for the foremothers that her male counterparts had overlooked, Rietz produced 19 recordings and reissues of unsung, trailblazing women and numerous women-centered concerts. For the past two decades, this body of work — recordings of over sixty women along with Rosetta’s detailed papers and deeply researched writings — has sat in a university archive, largely unexplored.

We would love to share our project as we develop best practices, process and advisory family.

DESCRIPTION

A sister project has sprung from the Hungry River Collaborative, and we would also love to chance to engage the NCPH community with that work. The Rosetta Circle continues our exploration of the transformative potential in the cross-fertilization of musicians in collaboration with archivists’ experience developing communities of care. The Rosetta Circle builds a similar singing circle of care around the women of Rosetta Records. Allison Russell and I discovered the Rosetta Records archive at Duke University while researching what the women in the Hungry River pictures might have heard, or sung themselves. This work is steeped in the ethics of care and radical empathy as well as the ways archives and music amplify each other’s ability to travel history to sing healing change.

The Rosetta Circle continues the work begun by Rosetta Rietz, uplifting women in music by creating a community of storytelling and celebration around the women whose recordings she worked to make sure the world heard. The cultural impact of these little-known but no-less-revolutionary women have made way for our voices – without them, we would not be here. Our work is to center our musical foremothers, and make positive change in women’s lives through community building, singing, and storytelling.

The Rosetta Circle’s first outcomes are the singing circle celebrating these pioneering women — a framework for a care-minded band to promote equity and loving change in an industry which historically worked against it — and an episodic audio documentary exploring the archive. Each episode of our audio documentary features an original archival recording beside a contemporary musical response, as well as an exploration of the social histories of the fierce women who made the recordings and how their risks and innovations directly impact our lives today. Our audio documentary exists alongside The Vanishing of Harry Pace as a broader invitation into the history of these rare recordings and the compelling, non-conforming lives of the women who made them. Setting early recordings beside our musical responses, we shine our shared lights on stories at risk of being lost as well as each other. We combine decades of experience in performance and documentary production to reach an audience who might see themselves reflected in this work. We are the echo, we sing the echo.

If you have a direct offer of assistance, sensitive criticism, or wish to pass along someone’s contact information confidentially, please get in contact directly: Tift Merritt, Franklin Humanities Institute, Duke University, [email protected] 

ALL FEEDBACK AND OFFERS OF ASSISTANCE SHOULD BE SUBMITTED BY JULY 7, 2022. If you have general ideas or feedback to share, please feel free to use the comments feature below.

Discussion