Daughter of a Lost Tribe: Madame Goldye Steiner, Shahanna McKinney Baldon and Echoes of Black Khazones

• In Event: Gender and Performance Studies

Abstract

Following on the recent research efforts of Henry Sapoznik into the history of African American performers of cantorial music in the early 20th century “golden age” of recording star cantors, singer and activist Shahanna McKinney Baldon began her own research and performance exploration of the life and work of one of the key performers in this previously unknown corner of Jewish American expressive culture. Madame Goldye Steiner, the stage name of soprano Gladys Mae Sellers Smack, was a Broadway stage actress, cabaret singer, and performer of khazones (the Yiddish term for cantorial art music). McKinney Baldon has spearheaded a multi-faceted project that involves public memorialization and performance inspired by the legacy of Madame Goldye. She refers to this work as rematriation, a project of reclaiming the memory of Madame Goldye’s pioneering work as a Black woman cantor into the current world of Jewish music and life. Claiming parallels between Madame Goldye and her own life as a Black Jewish woman and artist from the Midwest, McKinney Baldon’s project invokes themes of reanimation of archival sources through embodied acts of memory. Through ethnography and archival research, this paper talk will offer an account of McKinney Baldon’s work, exploring how methodologies of archival performance can achieve an uncanny re-presencing of seemingly forgotten moments of cultural intimacy and offer a reckoning to burning social and aesthetic issues of today.

Author

• Jeremiah Lockwood, Jeremiah Lockwood