The Deep Dive: An Interview with Cookie Woolner
It's been a minute, but we're back with the brilliant historian, researcher, professor, and author Cookie Woolner, who tackles queerness, size, and the relevance of music past and present
Photo by Lucy Garrett.
Cookie Woolner, aka Cookie Tuff, an associate professor in the history department at the University of Memphis, has been on my short list for a conversation ever since the publication of her book, The Famous Lady Lovers: Black Women and Queer Desire Before Stonewall, in 2023. Ironically, not long after I contacted Cookie, I interviewed for a position at UM myself. By the time I received her answers, I was sitting in a campus-wide orientation session as I prepared for my new role as a pre-award coordinator for the Institute for Intelligent Systems in the College of Arts and Sciences. Hence the lack of posts—after five years of working from home, I’ve spent the last several weeks familiarizing myself with the routine of an in-person position, walking endless loops around campus, and learning the protocols of the job.
I met Cookie several years ago, back when I was a curator at Memphis Brooks Museum of Art. She’d moved here from San Francisco to teach, and I was fascinated by her interest in the 1920s blues scene. What I didn’t know was that before landing here permanently, Cookie had visited Memphis when her band Subtonix toured with Lost Sounds. I can’t swear that I was at that show, but it’s likely.
While I am hardly an academic, I love reading the subtexts that Cookie deciphers and decodes in her work, and the connections she makes between musical communities that transcend time and heteronormative boundaries. Her ability to bring to life the underlying energy and context of raw music by artists like Bessie Smith gives new vitality to songs like Smith’s “Beale Street Mama” which was cut for Columbia Records on April 11, 1923.
Which came first: being a fan of circa 1920s blues singers, or seeking out music because it was made by queer Black women? Actually, what came first was an interest in representations of fat women, the topic of my undergrad thesis, and this led me to classic blues women like Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey, who I later learned were queer. Bessie Smith had a song where she matter-of-factly talked about weighing 200 pounds. Their songs about their unabashed desires, despite being fat Black women in the Jim Crow era, fully blew my mind as an insecure chubby college student. And then later, when I decided to focus on queer women's history for my PhD work, I came back to them again.
Can you explain what initially intrigued you about this topic? Well I have both personal and academic interests in the topic. Personally, I'm a fat queer woman and used to be a performer (a drummer and a burlesque dancer) and have always been interested in music and subculture at these intersections. And academically I wanted to help fill the gap in scholarship on the histories of queer women of color in the US, who haven't been the subject of such studies until pretty recently. At first, I planned to just focus on more well-known queer blues women and research how they were treated in the white male-dominated music industry of the 1920s and 30s, but when I got into the archives, I found very little info on what I had hoped to uncover. Instead, I kept finding these sensationalized newspaper stories in the Black press about violence between women in Prohibition spaces like speakeasies, so the book project expanded to be about not just about music but about the emergence of Black queer women's social worlds in the Interwar era.
How did you conduct research for The Famous Lady Lovers? It started out as a dissertation so I was very lucky to have a multiyear fellowship through my grad school that allowed me to travel to multiple archives over several years. I also applied for other grants to visit archives elsewhere. I was lucky to live in Brooklyn for two years during this time, where I had all of the archives of the NYC metro area at my convenience. I began with quite a few southern research trips to Emory, UNC Chapel Hill, Duke, then spent a lot of time in NYC and Chicago as well as Washington DC. Some of the archival collections I looked at were from record companies, vice reports that describe Prohibition spaces, letters and correspondence, blues songs, sexology case studies, among other types of sources. And I'm very lucky that so many newspapers from this time period have now been digitized and are available via online databases, like the ProQuest Black Historical Newspapers database, as they played a central role in this book.
How has writing about queer Black blues influenced your own understanding of Memphis history, music history, and culture? While many of the women in my book are from the South, I wasn't able to find many historical sources about Black queer life in the South in the 1920s and 30s, but that of course doesn't mean those worlds didn't exist. So my book is more about women in New York and Chicago, and the experiences of women while they toured the country as well. Not focusing on the South or rural locations has been a common critique of my book so far, which is understandable. There's been a big push to excavate queer southern history in the last decade, and Memphis just had its first major museum exhibit on local queer history at MoSH in the last couple years, so things are beginning to change in that regard. Unfortunately, as a northerner who moved here in 2016, I don't think I'll ever be an expert on queer southern history or Memphis history. My students have also told me I'll never be a real southerner! Tough crowd.
Why is it important to preserve the history and legacy of queer musicians? Because queer musicians are central players in American music history, simple as that. They've been there all along. They experienced additional struggles than other artists did, but their boldness, creativity and talent created genres like rock 'n' roll, and here I'm thinking specifically of Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Little Richard amongst others. Same for genres from disco to punk and new wave, and on and on. Plenty of performers haven't been "out of the closet" - which is a very modern concept and demand - but have pushed the boundaries of sound, art, and fashion. The thought of the world of music and art without queerness, is just, well, impossible to fathom.
Someone else who comes up in your book is Harry Pace, the founder of the label Black Swan Records, who lived in Memphis in the early twentieth century. Here, in his pre-Black Swan days, Pace started businesses with W.E.B. Du Bois and W.C. Handy. Pace was Black, yet, as NPR and numerous historians have noted, he seemed to live a double life as a White man, which his descendants didn’t discover until 2007. Do you see a kinship between Pace and queer Black women who perhaps wanted to keep the details of their personal life in the closet? I didn't know that Harry Pace also passed as White. He definitely was presenting as Black when he ran Black Swan records briefly in the early 1920s, as they billed themselves as a Black owned record company. In that context, he sought to present Black Swan recording artist Ethel Waters as single and available to men, even though she was traveling at the time with her girlfriend, dancer Ethel Williams. And when Bessie Smith auditioned for Pace, she spit on the floor to clear her throat in the recording booth, and that was enough for him to pass on signing her. I'm sure the fact that she was a large, dark skinned woman, unlike thin, light complected Ethel Waters, didn't help either. In the end it was his loss, as Black Swan Records could only afford to survive for a few years without signing southern blues singers, who might not have signified the "respectability" Pace desired, but they sure sold well.
In what ways do you think queer musicians are changing the landscape of the music industry today? Well, queer artist Chappell Roan just played the largest crowd in the history of Lollapolooza. Lil Nas X's coming out was a big deal when it happened, but in the years since (and that already seems so long ago!) queer artists have become much more mainstream. Young people keep coming out earlier and in larger numbers. Of course, as a grumpy Gen Xer, it's not like I think mainstream popularity or success should be necessary goals - that was called "selling out" when I was young and it was the worst that that could happen to a real artist. My interest is more in communities and subcultures than in markets and demographics, but these young queer artists' popularity clearly shows there's a larger market for queer acts. And then, let's not forget Jojo Siwa, who claims to have invented a new genre of music called 'gay pop.' Bless her heart, this is why we need music education.
What made you want to move to Memphis? My dream job and a pay check. It's really hard to find a tenure-track position as a historian these days, thanks to the decimation of higher education and the humanities. So there's a national job market which often brings folks to cities they have no prior ties to. Moving to the South as a 40-something northern, single, queer, feminist is really not something I would recommended. Capitalism and the desire to be a history nerd brought me here, 100%.
What’s the best (or hardest) part of living in Memphis? Hardest, see above! Best: living somewhere affordable, for the most part, is refreshing, and everything is generally nearby. Obviously the music scenes, the radio stations, the music history and museums and festivals. Overton Park and the forest in the middle of it. I also love being near the Delta and taking Mississippi day trips to Clarksdale, Oxford, and Water Valley.
Who are your favorite local musicians? I'm all about the ladies, of course, so regardless of current location or activity, I'd say NOTS and Valerie June. I don't make it out to local live music too much these days, but I always try to go to at least one Gonerfest show, although I also discoverd their livestream so now I can see the shows without leaving my couch, which is ideal since I just entered my 50s.
I just learned that you were in the San Francisco-based post-punk band Subtonix. Yes! I moved to San Francisco in 1997 after I finished college, specifically to take part in the queer punk subculture there that I read about in zines like Outpunk and Maximum Rocknroll. It was the era of queercore bands like Tribe 8, Cypher in the Snow, Team Dresch, and queer zines - mine was called Girl Fiend - and there were so many cool spaces for queer women from bars to coffeeshops and clubs to bookstores, etc. Subtonix formed in 1998 and we mostly played in all ages spaces and bars in San Francisco and Oakland, although we did play in the Northwest a few times (including at the very first Ladyfest in Olympia in 2000) and went on one national tour, which brought me to Memphis for the first time in 2001, right before 9/11. We were part of a very cute Bay Area scene with bands like Clone (ex-Seven Year Bitch), the Little Deaths, Erase Errata, the Phantom Limbs, and a lot of other punky/new wave/core type of bands.
Subtonix played a gig in Memphis with Lost Sounds in mid-2001. What do you remember about that show? One of my bandmates had connected beforehand with Alicja Trout, probably through zines and letters. We all thought Lost Sounds were amazing and were really excited to play with them. Beforehand, Alicja took us down to the Mississippi River, which some of my bandmates had never seen, and then we went to Beale Street, which I thought was really cool. It has a very different vibe for someone used to NYC/SF. (Of course now that I live here, I avoid it, but I do love to bring visitors there and to march down Beale for protests and Pride!) And then since most of us were vegetarian, we ended up at Huey's for veggie burgers. My memory of the venue is hazy, it might have been a warehouse, I remember low ceilings and it being kind of rickety. Afterwards we all hung out at a house, probably Alicja and Jay's, where I got way too drunk and passed out and was very hungover for our drive to New Orleans the next day to play a very queer show at the Mermaid Lounge with Ovary Action. Also when I woke up on the floor of that house, there was a bowl of pasta I hadn't touched that was lovingly prepared for me by Savana Raught, who I reconnected with here through my awesome hair colorist Holly Woods. Lost Sounds later played in the Bay Area a bunch after that and sometimes stayed at our SF apartment and it was was a sweet band friendship. Whenever I come home from a trip and see the image of Alicja and her guiar, at the airport, I get excited. She's like the queen of Memphis to me!
You teach a course about American music culture. Are you surprised by what music your students are interested in, or, on the other hand, what music bores them? I was shocked that very few students came to class on the day we were discussing the birth of punk, disco and hip hop in the 1970s. I know I'm biased as a Gen X weirdo but American popular music doesn't get much better than that! I was also surprised to learn that a student only knew of the most popular classic rock songs from playing Guitar Hero. As someone who is now 50 and doesn't have kids or spend much time around kids, I get more surprised at the chasm of knowledge between me and my students every year. But finding ways to make the past relevant is an important and fun challenge for me, luckily.
What are you currently working on? I'm still looking for the topic of my next new book length research project, but in the meantime I'm writing a chapter for a queer history textbook (the first of its kind) on the history of bisexuality in the US and am assembling a two volume reference book of historical sources from queer history. I want to write something biographical about the 1990s, as there so many little projects, communities, events and gatherings that haven't been documented, and there's such a danger of losing so much of the immediate pre-internet world. Everything I work on, no matter about the recent past or farther back, tends to be about lesser known queer underbellies. I'm also on the editorial board of the Journal of Fat Studies, speaking of bellies, and am on an advisory committee for a 2025 exhibit at the New York Historical Society about the Black queer 1920s and the Harlem Renaissance, which is exciting.
The New York Times’ T Magazine just ran a fascinating piece called When I Was 30, in which 30 creative people, ranging in age from 34 to 93, were asked to share an indelible memory from their thirtieth year. What was it like for you to be 30 and queer? It was pretty fabulous! I turned 30 in Las Vegas with five of my best friends from San Francisco, where I still lived at the time. I had started doing burlesque with other fat women the year prior, and on my birthday we went to see Zumanity, the first "adults only" Cirque du Soilel show, which was basically like a burlesque show with the biggest budget ever. We spent the rest of the night after that at a complex off the main strip which had both a queer dance club and a punk bar. Going back and forth between the Vegas punk bar and the gay bar with my closest friends, as I rang in a new decade that took to me to places I would never imagine at the time, was a good way to ring in being queer and 30. I also went on tour with my former bandmate's new band the Vanishing that summer as roadie and burlesque dancer and then started my master's program, which led me to where I ended up today.
More information on Cookie Woolner’s research and publications.
More on her book, The Famous Lady Lovers.