On an unusually warm spring day in Durham, North Carolina, I visit the Rosetta Reitz Archive Collective’s table at the Bass Connections Showcase at Duke University. The Collective (now completing its third year) is a vibrant, student-centered effort at critically evaluating Reitz’s dogged attempts to preserve the voices and lives of early-twentieth-century blues performers. I’ve been invited to learn more about this research group’s work by its two co-convenors, Dr. Margaret “Lou” Brown and Tift Merritt, by virtue of my own interests in women’s archival and material recovery projects in the twentieth century. Reitz, a single mother who first published a mushroom cookery book and a feminist guide to menopause before founding Rosetta Records–a label devoted to republishing out-of-print tracks by women blues performers– has gained a niche reputation for both the rigorousness of her research (evidenced, most vividly, in the extensive liner notes of her records) and her curation of performance and multimedia projects that recentered and reintroduced performers like Sippie Wallace, Big Mama Thornton, the International Sweethearts of Rhythm, Nell Carter, Victoria Spivey, and many, many, others.
The Collective’s display at Bass Connections is a humanist island in a sea of science and tech projects. The students’ presentation of their research work is deliberately (one could say, even, politically) hand-made. In reflection of the collaborative nature of their research, they have compiled their separate projects with the Reitz archive into a single, scrap-booked posterboard, flanked by a record player upon which one of Rosetta’s records is spinning away. Reitz’s book on menopause is laid out, next to several of her albums, featuring black-and-white photographs of their subjects emblazoned with pink lettering: Mean Mothers. Ida Cox–Wild Women Don’t Have the Blues. Women’s Railroad Blues (Sorry But I Can’t Take You).
I meet Madison, a sophomore who has focused primarily on the production history of The International Sweethearts of Rhythm (1986), an ill-starred, eponymous documentary collaboration between Reitz and the feminist filmmakers Greta Schiller and Andrea Weiss; and Claire, a junior who has constructed a small quilt that literalizes both the material significance of a concert program hand-drafted by Rosetta Reitz and Claire’s own role, as archival examiner, in organizing that draft into a coherent, interpretive narrative. Atop the quilt, a sign in bold letters: “This is real but it may not be true.” I chat with Aria, a senior who primarily worked with the materials for the Reitz-organized “Blues is a Woman” Concert at the 1980 Newport Jazz Festival, in which many of the blues women singing their guts out on Rosetta records were able to perform in a celebration of their contributions to music. I leaf through the pages of the menopause book briefly, finding a table where Reitz has meticulously recorded her own menses for a calendar year. I show it to Tift, who chuckles. “That is so Rosetta.”
As I peruse the table, stopping, for a moment, to listen to the International Sweethearts of Rhythm–perhaps the first integrated women’s swing band in America–on the record player’s headphones, I’m struck by the reflexive, curiously doubling nature of the Archive Collective’s work: as Rosetta carefully, meticulously tracked down and researched the lives and careers of Ida Cox, Nell Carter, Bessie Smith, and Ma Rainey, so do the students at Duke now track down and inhabit the processes and effects of her relentless, scholarly, activist drive.
Derrida famously argued that the intimate pleasures of archival research are deeply entangled with the researcher’s knowledge of the archive’s inherently, socially constructed nature and, in turn, its inherent destructibility. The archive fever so often invoked by researchers is doubly provoked by both what is missing from the archive–the affective gaps, mysteries, anonymous contributions, and palimpsestic traces of institutional and personal control–and the knowledge of the ephemerality of even this best-preserved material collection of a person’s life. In talking with the researchers of the Rosetta Reitz Archive Collective, I read this passion, this fever, for their projects, and the deep intimacy that they have struck with Rosetta Reitz through her papers. This intimacy provokes an old dilemma of archival researchers: how best to manage those knowing, affectionate, or overintimate bonds that inevitably develop between a collection of artifacts, the person whose life has generated them, and the person who comes to sift through them? Frankly, how to keep one’s self sane in the midst of this scholarly pursuit? Research involves a great deal of feeling, of love. With that love, too, comes frustration.
In talking with the researchers of the Rosetta Reitz Archive Collective, I read this passion, this fever, for their projects, and the deep intimacy that they have struck with Rosetta Reitz through her papers.
At 9am on the following Friday, I am able to learn more about the individual projects of the Collective through their end-of-year presentations, delivered for their research cohort, Tift and Lou, myself, and a few other guests. As we dive into the researchers’ work, the brief sketches of their endeavors provided at Wednesday’s fair are fruitfully elaborated upon–and, again, with much feeling. As Olivia presents her research on Reitz’s book on menopause, dwelling on a letter from Rosetta condemning the medical establishment’s disregard for women’s experiential knowledge, I scribble in my notebook: “This was a damn angry woman.” And she was. In organizing the “Blues is a Woman” concert or relentlessly critiquing the structure and editing of Weiss and Schiller’s The International Sweethearts of Rhythm (1986) or fighting with the publishers about photos for the covers of her records, Reitz, it becomes clear to me, was continuously frustrated–at the people whose biases or obtuseness thwarted her mission and, mainly, at the unequal world that made her living scholarship so necessary.
Many of the students’ presentations engage with this frustration head on; others, interestingly, seem almost to channel it. Claire, in walking us through the jumbled notes and phone numbers that constitute the first draft of a concert program created by Reitz, points us to a tantalizingly scribbled-out name and number, a scrawled note in Reitz’s hand floating above it: “definitely not a feminist.” “What does that even mean?” Claire wonders aloud– a question common to those who sift through the material remnants of the unrecoverable. Ishanvi, in a presentation on Reitz’s records as archival projects in themselves, pinpoints Reitz’s disadvantaged position as a foundational researcher of these women. She found what Rosetta notes, in a liner note, that she couldn’t– a photograph of one of the more ‘obscure’ blues performers included on one of the records–in “a couple of Substack searches.” The conflict, in Reitz’s work, between the construction of an archive and the maintenance of a commercial enterprise–as evidenced in her choosing of one better-preserved recording over another as ‘definitive,’ for example–grates on these latter-day researchers, provoking ethical questions that remain difficult, unanswerable.
At the end of the presentations, we gather around a table where Madison has constructed a sprawling, pencil-drawn map of The International Sweethearts of Rhythm documentary (1986): the principal or leading members of the band, part-time members, those who appeared in the film, those who were interviewed but did not appear, and on and on outwards, connections to the work converted into a constellation of intimacies, friendships, failed partnerships. It’s a pain-staking piece of work that, like everything worked on by members of the Collective, maintains a necessary porosity, an openness to revision and reworking into new forms. Madison speaks ruefully of the documentary, its acrimonious history and contested debut. The filming process, which saw the ouster of Rosetta Reitz amid threats of litigation, resulted in (in both Madison’s and Reitz’s respective opinions) a flawed final product. The contrast between all that bitterness and the carefully sketched, interpersonal connections laid out on the paper before us is, on reflection, a difficult one with which to contend. “I’m not sure I’m on good terms with the International Sweethearts anymore,” Madison says thoughtfully, when asked if she’ll continue her research. Lou nods: “All research breaks your heart a little,” she says.
And so it does.
Sophie Yates is an independent researcher and recent doctoral graduate in English from the University of British Columbia. Her work focuses on the conversational intertextuality and citational print and stylistic tactics that bind together the canonical works of literary modernism and radfem, lesbian, and queer independent publications in the latter half of the twentieth century.
