The Rosetta Circle

Feminist pioneer and jazz historian Rosetta Reitz 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, Reitz produced eighteen albums of unsung, trailblazing women. Reitz was also a business owner, an author, a restaurant critic, a fabulous cook, a bohemian single mother – a truly energetic original.  She wrote a book on menopause when she could not find one written by a woman;  she included her recipe for chicken soup with veal bones to accompany her favorite recordings.  Historian and scholar Daphne Brooks calls her “a multi-hyphenate wonder” and “an ally who wants…forward the voices of the artists themselves.”  For the next year, I will be part of a collective of archivists, scholars, researchers and artists collaborating with Duke University’s Forum for Scholars and Publics and the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture on a Bass Connections project exploring how to bring Rosetta’s archive — recordings of over sixty women along with her detailed papers and deeply researched writings — into contemporary artistic and scholarly practice.

The Rosetta Circle is a creative response to Reitz’s work uplifting women, a performance collective of care which begins by celebrating the unsung foremothers of jazz and blues on Rosetta Records.  The cultural impact of all of these little-known but no-less- revolutionary women have made way for today’s voices. The Rosetta Circle works to center our musical foremothers and make positive change in women’s lives through community building, singing, and storytelling.

Inspired by archivist communities of care as well as Reitz’s passion, the Rosetta Circle approaches singing and storytelling as care work. We bring archival principles of care on stage, while building a collaborative practice that cares for women in the collective. The transactional music marketplace most often divides and isolates women in competition and streams their work without context and credits – a powerful new form of musical erasure. This creative intervention explores how to participate in the music industry by supporting each other. Music is more than a commodity — it is a healing ritual, a form of loving, a spiritual practice to which people dedicate their lives. We bring our musical and spiritual resources together to create not only a loving noise but a path forward which upholds these values. 

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Rosetta Circle’s Working Principles 

‣ Inspired by Rosetta Reitz, we explore how to best continue the spirit of her work through collaboration and multiple viewpoints.

‣ We are a storytelling care circle practicing feminist ethics of care, radical empathy and non-hierarchical structures. 

‣ We speak back to the music business’s historically harmful practices like racism, sexism, unfair labor practices, as well as its dominant narrative leaving women on the sidelines of the story.

‣ Our goal is to develop sustainable singing as care work, caring not only for untold stories of our foremothers, but also the women in the circle.

‣ Our collaborative work pursues musical storytelling’s ability to be resistance, change agent, education, public history, and community celebration.

‣ Women and circles of women have long been keepers of history and memory as well as agents of change.  We honor the circles before us which made way for ours.