In ‘Shine Bright,’ Danyel Smith Champions Black Female Pop Music

On her music podcast show, Black Girl Songbook, the journalist Danyel Smith spotlights the important figures in Black female pop music, putting their achievements in historical perspective. In addition to devoting episodes to such legends as Mariah Carey, Whitney Houston, Natalie Cole and Aaliyah, Smith had musical artists appear on the program, including H.E.R., Stephanie Mills, Brandy, Deborah Cox, Karyn White and CeCe Winans. The Black Girl Songbook gives Smith a platform to really engage with her guests through thoughtful questions about their artistry and craft.

“I feel oftentimes when I’m speaking to Black women is that [they] are so happy to be knowledgeably asked about the specifics of their work,” says Smith. “It doesn’t happen as often as maybe we would like to think that it does–the way that people are scholars of certain rock groups or pop singers and journalists can come into an interview with Bruce Springsteen or Elton John and say, ‘Well, on the third song of your second album, I saw you brought in a guitarist from blah, blah, blah—and then you guys did the same thing together on the fifth album and it became a hit. Can you talk about the growth between…?’ That’s what I think about the interview with CeCe Winans, just asking her about her actual voice, or what did she hear when she hears her voice. I want to know, and I’m a regular person. So I feel like if I want to know, I’m speaking for a lot of folks.”

Smith’s mission in championing Black female musicians’ accomplishments is not only evident on the podcast but also in her most recent book Shine Bright: A Very Personal History of Black Women in Pop, published by Roc Lit 101. It highlights such famed legends such as Houston, Carey, Diana Ross, Aretha Franklin, Janet Jackson and Gladys Knight— along with unsung stars like Stephanie Mills, Marilyn McCoo and Jody Watley. The commonalities shared by these extraordinary women are not only their commercial and artistic successes but their personal and professional obstacles within society and the music industry. And because of these heroines, the current generation of stars like Beyonce, Rhianna, SZA and Lizzo are thriving today in the pop music mainstream.

Shine Bright is not just a history lesson—it is also a part memoir in which Smith seamlessly weaves in her own story of growing up in 1970s Oakland and her passion for music while also facing challenges in her personal life. She later pursued music journalism, which led to her to become the first Black female editor-in-chief of VIBE. “My love for music is intense. My commitment to it is steadfast. This project is an attempt to figure out why,” Smith writes in Shine Bright’s introduction, and then later adds in the book’s outro: “… so many Black women and so much of Black women’s work is undervalued and strategically un-remembered. We cannot sit quietly while everyone dresses like us and sings like us and writes like us and just kind of steals us from ourselves.”

Originally published last year, Shine Bright was recently printed in paperback. This interview with Smith has been edited for length and clarity.

What inspired you to write the book?

Smith: When you’re a person like myself who loves music in a very intense way, I’m always looking for ways to express and share that love. That’s what music in a lot of ways does for us. You always want to give somebody your playlist or burn somebody a CD–or, in my case, write somebody a review or tell somebody a story about music. I’ve always been mortified by how Black women in music do not receive the credit that they’re due. And so I wanted to tell those stories. I wanted to tell them in a very particular and detailed way. I didn’t want to write a book of firsts. I think firsts are quite important, but I think sometimes they can be flattening to the idiosyncrasies of personality, in achievement and often in tragedy. So I wanted to do that.

You seamlessly interweave the stories of these legendary musical figures with your own personal story of growing up in Oakland and embarking on the path to music journalism. Your experiences and that of your subjects kind of parallel each other in the sense of fighting to be heard.

I put a lot of thought into it. It was one of the reasons the book took so long….I’ve noticed that over the course of my career as a journalist, you don’t always feel comfortable when you’re writing a profile of someone else, [and then] jumping in with all of your personal business and story. But you feel it, you notice it. You journal about it, and you work toward a situation like this when you can try to connect the dots.

As you say, there’s this fight to be heard. There’s also this fight to be seen, and to be remembered again in detail. I remember as a high school student, I was thinking, “Maybe I could have this job [in journalism] because Black woman journalists that were known for going on the road with bands, and stuff like that were few and far between.

When I would read stories about the Beatles or Sly and the Family Stone, or any of those iconic groups from my mom’s era, there would be so much detail about what kind of shampoo Paul McCartney used or the thigh-high books that Sly Stone had on–“What were they made of? And where did he purchase them?” Then you would read the stories about the women artists at that time–which were so often written by male writers–and the detail just wasn’t there. I was literally very mad about that. And that’s why from an early age I wanted to tell very detailed stories about Black women’s lives. So that’s why we have Shine Bright.

Your book doesn’t immediately start off with the major Black female pop stars such as Aretha Franklin and the Supremes but rather the stories of earlier figures–among them, 18th-century poet Phillis Wheatley, opera legend Leontyne Price, and the 1960s New Orleans girl group the Dixie Cups. Why that chronology?

They made it into the book because they meant a great deal to me and to my sister. They meant a great deal to my mother, her sister and their friends, or they meant a great deal to my grandmother or even my great-grandmother and great-grandfather. So Phills Wheatley makes it in there for the intellectual reason that she’s our first global star. She sang her poems. She took the Middle Passage the other way and performed throughout London in pre-Revolutionary War times. She is not spoken about enough.

I love the Supremes. Everybody loves the Supremes. They are a genius group, they’re the prototype. But there were other groups, and they also weren’t the first. They’re so impactful that it seems they are the prototype. And Diana Ross has said “we are the prototype even for the groups that came before us.” That’s why the Dixie Cups are there, and also because my family came up from New Orleans to California in the early 1920s. So I have Louisiana literally in my blood, and I wanted to think about Louisiana music as it related to Black women in pop.

You also give a voice in the book to other Black female artists who had commercial and chart success but don’t often get fuller recognition— Marilyn McCoo, Jody Watley, Stephanie Mills and Natalie Cole, among them.

We don’t talk enough about Marilyn McCoo and Jodi Watley. I feel American culture decides who are the ones, and even they don’t get enough attention. It’s like “If we’re going to talk about Black women in pop, we’re going to talk about these five.” And it’s like, “Can we switch up that model and talk about Linda Greene [of the 1970s duo Peaches and Herb], who went to number one twice with “Reunited” and “Shake Your Groove Thing?” The fact that there are several different women that all had the same name [“Peaches”] is heartbreaking to me because it speaks to the way people are ready to accept Black women as just interchangeable. So that’s why I wanted to tell Linda Greene’s story of being a middle-class Black woman growing up in the D.C.- Maryland-Virginia area, and singing in Virginia Beach when it was still pretty much segregated, a person who was among the first classes of Black kids who integrated high schools This shows up in how she sounds…It’s relevant to who she is as a number one pop artist, but yet people don’t talk about her enough.

One of the poignant aspects of Shine Bright is your love for Gladys Knight and the Pips’ famous hit, “Midnight Train to Georgia,” since you were a kid. It’s a song that resonated with you.

It does. I’ll never not listen to the song all the way through. I don’t care if I’m in the grocery store…I’m going to listen to the song to the end because: one, it deserves that respect. And two, whatever emotion I’m in the middle of, it serves it because the song is full of so many emotions, and also Gladys Knight’s voice is the most perfect in the history of recorded music. Again, it’s not like she hasn’t received all of the awards, but somehow she doesn’t come up [in terms of wider recognition] enough for me. And I’m sure Gladys Knight is not mad about it, but as we say sometimes in the Black community, “My sister doesn’t have to be mad. I’m going to be mad for her.” That song and the storytelling in her voice and that record, and the interplay between her and the Pips, and the many, many ways that you can decide what that story’s ending is or isn’t. So I wanted to tell the story of the making of that song.

You devote a chapter to Donna Summer, who is often regarded as the “queen of disco.” But she also transcended that label through her amazing voice and artistry.

That’s the other reason why Phillis is there. She’s a daughter of Phillis Wheatley. They are Boston girls, both of them. Donna also had to leave the United States of America to get her life. Disco was told that it sucked, that it needed to die, and that it wasn’t real music. Mainstream white male rock critics and DJs definitely felt this way. But there were also people in Black musical circles who felt that disco was a watering down of soul music. It was gaslighting on a global level about disco. Can you imagine being Donna Summer and having number one hit after number one hit, and number one album after number one album—and being told that what you’re doing is fake and not real and not actually good? Donna Summer is a genius. She’s not the “queen of disco”—she’s a queen of pop. It needs to be discussed and remembered as such.

To me, the chapter about Aretha Franklin and Whitney Houston was the longest and perhaps most dramatic section of the book–particularly about Whitney. You recalled interviewing her in the mid-1990s for a VIBE cover story. What was that experience like chatting with Whitney at her home?

It’s an emotional topic for me. I don’t know if I have the vocabulary for it back then to say (pause) she’s extremely anxious. To me, there was such a push-pull in her of wanting to be secretive about her life and being desperate to tell somebody everything. I treasure that afternoon. One of my most treasured afternoons of my career. And I met [her daughter] Bobbi Kristina as a toddler that day. I met Robyn [Crawford, her friend] that day. I was struck by how all of Whitney’s trophies were downstairs in a large and beautiful closet-type space, but in the basement—her Grammys, her American Music Awards, all those things–when quite honestly, “Girl put them in the window. Put them on the mantle.” But so often women and Black women are not celebrated even in their own home for the work that they do outside of the home.

So I loved it. It was illuminating. It was humbling. She’s such a smart woman. Whitney knew how to move and shake in this music industry, and she taught me some lessons that have frankly saved my life many times after the time I spent with her.

Mariah Carey, who is mentioned in your book and podcast, doesn’t often get the props an artist–whereas the media focus has been more on her celebrity. Can you discuss her significance as an artist?

She is a premiere singer, songwriter and producer of American pop. She has literally influenced every singer that has come after her. She successfully merged pop and soul and hip-hop before a lot of people were doing it and before a lot of women were doing it as Mariah was doing it. If Mariah decided to right now produce and write for others, she would have a whole other hall-of-fame career. As a songwriter, there are so few that are as good as she. And the fact that she isn’t referred to as a singer-songwriter every time she is mentioned in any piece of journalism, it is criminal to me. And it distorts her legacy.

Men have tabloid lives, too, but somehow men can exist in this space where, “Yeah, there’s a tabloid life, but also he’s a musical genius and we have to lift him up constantly.” They remind people every day through documentaries, essays and biopics—we have to do it all the time to remind people what an actual musical and intellectual and creative genius he is. But Black women do not get that same kind of treatment…Meanwhile, Black women struggle to get funding for their documentary and feature film projects, especially if they’re telling the stories of Black women and Black women artists. Like, “Come on. Can we change course?”

It seems that we’re currently in a golden age of Black female pop music with Beyonce, Rihanna, Lizzo, SZA (whom you recently profiled for The New York Times) and Megan Thee Stallion on the scene.

When you run them off like that, it sounds amazing. You can add Nicki Minaj to that. There’s so much. It’s amazing. And the thing is, and there’s those that are bubbling up even under them at this point, who are doing amazing and brilliant work that we’re gonna see play out over the years and decades to come. There’s still so much to sing about, there’s still so much to rap about, and there’s still so much to write about.

Do you foresee perhaps a direct or indirect sequel to Shine Bright that touches on some other major Black women musicians who weren’t mentioned in the book?

The answer to that question is ‘absolutely.’ We’re over here doing Black women work, were doing Black girl work, making these things happen and doing the thing I love most, which is writing, period—telling stories of Black women and of Black people, people who are marginalized and people whose stories are not told enough. I like being in the middle of that and doing that work.

I do feel there are a lot of people doing good work in the space right now. There is a little bit of a renaissance of people writing about Black women in music– whether it’s Daphne Brooks, Dawnie Walton, Clover Hope– people who are really out here saying, “I’m going to write it because it’s not being written, and it’s important and it’s beautiful. I’m going to put in the work and the effort, and it’s going to be amazing.” I see women in the documentary space trying to do the same thing. And so I feel I’m a part of an incredible cord of people who are setting the record straight about the contributions of Black women to music.