In the 1950s, a quartet of Black teenage girls called the Four Debs was the darling of Brooklyn's local music scene. They were lauded in the press, tapped for international touring, and even recorded an original song. But then, just as their career was taking off, they vanished from the press.
This talk will take you inside the detective work of archival research to explore questions like: who were the Four Debs? Why did they vanish? And, most importantly, who gets to tell their story? Answering these questions means reckoning with the ways in which historical documents influence our ideas about who "matters" in history.
About the speaker: Emmalouise St. Amand is a Ph. D. Candidate in the Musicology Department at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, NY.
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