Frustrating Intimacies: A Week with the Rosetta Reitz Archive Collective

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.

Author Sophie Yates with the Rosetta Reitz team. Photo credit Les Todd