About

Cheryl L. Keyes is a faculty member associated with the UCLA Department of African American Studies. The provided page does not contain specific details about her research focus, background, or key contributions. Therefore, no further biographical information is available from the given text.

Research topics

• Computer Science

Selected publications

• Revolutionary Generation:

  2026-02-10

  book-chapterSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• 5. Revolutionary Generation: Women, Gender, and Sexuality in Hip Hop

  2026-02-25

  book-chapterSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Frontmatter

  Penn State University Press eBooks · 2022

  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science

  Music shapes our world more powerfully than any other cultural product.

  DOI

• Long Live Hip-Hop

  2021-06-24

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton: An American Musical, a musical adaptation of Ron Chernow’s 2004 biography, advanced the marriage of hip-hop and the musical that Miranda had introduced in his earlier show In the Heights. Employing hip-hop aesthetics and performance in an unparalleled yet effective way, Hamilton’s libretto is rendered in a spoken-word style, adhering to a hip-hop sing-songy style of delivery and embodied by a multi-ethnic cast with swaggering bodies and hip-hop-style moves. This essay examines the hip-hop aesthetic qualities of Miranda’s Hamilton, situating the show as a part of the continuum of hip-hop music, culture, and performance practice, and the manner by which the musical draws from real life hip-hop personae as templates for character-building via the art of rap as a storytelling device. Such analysis proves that hip-hop has been recharged with a new life, meaning, and context on the American musical stage.

  PublisherDOI

• Rap/Hip-Hop

  2019-06-26

  reference-entry1st authorCorresponding

  Rap evolved as a vernacular term used among African Americans to define a stylized way of speaking. Over the years, black radio disc jockeys, musicians, literary figures, and 1960s political figures incorporated rap into their performances or way of speaking to appeal to black audiences. By the early 1970s, rap continued its development in the urban streets among “rhymin’ emcees” (MCs) accompanied by pre-recorded music, provided by a disc jockey on two turntables. This concept became associated with a youth arts movement driven and populated by black and Latino youth in New York City called hip-hop. Comprised of four elements—breakdancing (b-boying/b-girling), graffiti (writing), disc jockeying (DJing), and emceeing (MCing)—hip-hop also distinguishes a distinct form of dress, gesture, and language that embodies an urban street consciousness. By the late 1970s, the rhymin’ MC/DJ combination attracted music entrepreneurs who recognized the commercial potential with the release of the recording “Rapper’s Delight” by the Sugarhill Gang. Subsequently, music trade magazines such as Billboard contributed to popularizing the MC/DJ concept as rap music. Additionally, the production of hip-hop arts via the silver screen, advertising, and fashion industries further contributed to its rise to global prominence. Realizing its viability to a growing youth constituency, entrepreneurs placed significant value on certain elements of hip-hop believed to be more marketable to youth consumers in the popular music mainstream. For example, MCing and DJing became primary markets while breakdancing and graffiti served as hip-hop’s secondary markets. As such, rap music eventually eclipsed in popularity breakdancing and graffiti, thus solidifying this music category. Occasionally, critics and aficionados use rap music interchangeably with hip-hop. The sources herein will be used interchangeably as rap music/hip-hop along with their associates (breakdance and graffiti), and allied traditions. Similar to the burgeoning success of hip-hop culture in the mainstream popular culture, rap garnered the attention of academicians during the late 1980s, who perceived it as fertile ground for the study of popular youth culture. This is evident with a flurry of theses, articles, books, journalistic writings, and photo-essays leading to the establishment of hip-hop studies. Today, there are thousands of written sources on hip-hop. Rather than attempting to present all of these written sources, which would be beyond the scope of this bibliography, this article instead offers a survey of book sources and seminal journal articles that reflect the erudition, scholarly depth, and interdisciplinary scope of hip-hop studies.

  PublisherDOI

• “Ain’t Nuthin’ but a She Thang”: Women in Hip Hop

  2016-10-26

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Hip hop emerged among Black and Latino youth in New York City around the early 1970s. It is defi ned by its adherents as a youth arts movement comprised of four elements-breakdancing (b-boying/b-girling), graffi ti (writing), disc jockeying (DJing), and emceeing (MCing)—and as an expression distinguished by distinct forms of dress, gesture, and language that embody an urban street consciousness. By the late 1970s, hip hop had caught the attention of music entrepreneurs who recognized its commercial potential with the release of the recording “Rapper’s Delight” by the Sugarhill Gang (1979). Following the overwhelming success of this recording, hip hop steadily moved from the inner-city streets of New York City into popular mainstream culture. Additionally, the production of hip hop arts via the silver screen, the advertising industry, and underground promotion strategies (e.g., mixtapes) have further contributed to its rise to national prominence. 2 Realizing its viability to a growing youth constituency, entrepreneurs began placing signifi cant value on certain elements of hip hop believed to be more marketable to the average consumer. For example, MCing and DJing were positioned as primary markets of exploitation while breakdancing and graffi ti became secondary markets of hip hop. As such, the former two eventually eclipsed in popularity breakdancing and graffi ti, thus introducing the music category rap music. Occasionally, critics and afi - cionados of rap music use the term interchangeably with hip hop, or more specifi cally, hip hop music.

  PublisherDOI

• “She Was Too Black for Rock and Too Hard for Soul”: (Re)discovering the Musical Career of Betty Mabry Davis

  American studies · 2013-01-01 · 9 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  “She Was Too Black for Rock and Too Hard for Soul”: (Re)discovering the Musical Career of Betty Mabry Davis Cheryl L. Keyes (bio) Betty Mabry Davis is an artist whose name has gone unheralded as a pioneer in the annals of funk and rock. Most writing on these musical genres has traditionally placed male artists like Jimi Hendrix, George Clinton (of Parliament-Funkadelic), and bassist Larry Graham as trendsetters in the shaping of a funk rock music sensibility. During the heyday of these artists, it was Betty Mabry Davis who meshed both musical styles equally well. However, her contribution as a pioneer of funk rock was eclipsed by her contemporaries. I was first made aware of Betty Mabry Davis via Miles Davis’s autobiographical sketch (M. Davis 1990). Here, he describes his second wife, Betty Mabry, who was then twenty-three-years old, nearly half his age. Upon seeing her, Miles Davis was initially captivated by Mabry’s beauty, and he chose her as the face to grace his album Filles de Kilimanjaro (1968). Among the five tracks on the album was “Mademoiselle Mabry,” composed by Miles as a salute to his soon-to-be wife. In September with Filles de Kilimanjaro was released, Betty Mabry and Miles Davis were married and she became his second wife, thus acquiring his last name, Davis. However, Miles Davis would soon realize that his wife was more than a pretty face. She was a gifted musician who became his muse: [End Page 35] I had met a beautiful young singer and songwriter named Betty Mabry, whose picture is on the cover of Filles de Kilimanjaro (1968). . . . Betty was a big influence on my personal life as well as my musical life. She introduced me to the music of Jimi Hendrix—and to Jimi Hendrix himself—and other black rock music and musicians. She knew Sly Stone and all those guys, and she was great herself. If Betty were singing today she’d be something like Madonna; something like Prince, only as a woman. She was the beginning of all that when she was singing as Betty Davis. She was just ahead of her time. (M. Davis 1990, 290) Although their marriage was short lived, Betty Davis stepped beyond the shadows of her well-known ex-husband and became a reigning funk rock diva during the 1970s. Her voice resembled a belter, a style that fitted neatly into the rhythmic grooves or “pockets” of any hard-driving funk rock band of the time. Capitalizing on her successful career as a fashion model, Betty Davis’s signature outfits included fishnet stockings, thigh-high leather boots or high-heeled shoes, hot pants or teddylike wear, a quasi-cosmic-like or Amazon-woman-warrior look, and she donned a big Afro hairdo, as seen on her first three albums: Betty Davis, They Say I’m Different, and Nasty Gal.1 While there is no stage performance footage of Davis to date, just by her album covers and musical performance alone she undoubtedly exploited the erotic. However, Betty Davis was by no means just a physical presence. Unlike funk rock women performers during her time, she also succeeded in songwriting, composing, and arranging, and she owned her music publishing company. Between 1973 and 1979, Betty Davis recorded five studio albums: Betty Davis (Just Sunshine, 1973), They Say I’m Different (Just Sunshine, 1974), Nasty Gal (Island Records, 1975), Is It Love or Desire (Island Records, 1976), and Crashin’ from Passion (ZYX Music, 1979). Disillusioned by the politics of the music industry and her refusal to compromise, Betty Davis then retreated from public view, but on her own terms. Within the last few years, there has been a growing interest in the music of Betty Davis. In spring 2007, she appeared on the cover of the music vintage trade magazine Wax Poetics. The Seattle-based independent label of vintage classics, Light in the Attic, rereleased her first three albums and, for the first time, released her fourth album, Is It Love or Desire (B. Davis 2009b). Some of her music from her early years is sampled by hip-hop artists from Ice Cube and Method Man to Redman...

  PublisherDOI

• Miami Bass

  Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World · 2012-01-01

  other1st authorCorresponding

  Miami bass is a subgenre of hip-hop music which emerged among African-American musicians in southern Florida during the 1980s. It acquired the name because of its heavy emphasis on a booming bass quality created by the ‘kick drum’ (bass drum) produced on the Roland TR-808 drum machine. Miami bass la

  PublisherDOI

• Hip-Hop

  Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World · 2012-01-01

  other1st authorCorresponding

  Hip-hop can be defined as a mass cultural movement that emerged among black and Latino youth in New York City during the 1970s and has since spread around the world. It is identified by four key elements – breakdancing (a distinctive style of dance practiced by dancers known as ‘b-boys’ and ‘b-girls

  PublisherDOI

• Sound, Voice, and Spirit: Teaching in the Black Music Vernacular

  Black Music Research Journal · 2009-03-22 · 19 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  The study of African-American music and flourished during the twentieth century. Its varied approaches and perspectives earned its inclusion as a vibrant area of interest in the study of American music as well as its respectability in the academy. Prior to the 1960s, the bulk of studies on black music focused on field recording collections ranging from worksongs and spirituals to the ruralblues and addressed questions regarding its continued connections to an African past. (1) As such, scholars often characterized African-American music in terms of selected features that were, by varying degrees, present or absent in Western European music. For example, syncopation, a term derived from the discussion of European classical music, was most commonly used by music educators to underscore a salient feature of black music characterized by a preponderance of off beat feels or the layering/juxtaposition of various melorhythmic pulses in comparison to Western-derived music. By the 1960s, a cadre of scholars emerged, who unlike their predecessors, incorporated a sociocultural perspective that revealed the lived experiences and voices of the African-American community. They were, for the most part, native scholars or cultural insiders, ranging in profession from artists to music historians, who led the way for a broader and more objective interpretation to the study of African-American history and culture (Burnim and Maultsby with Oehler 2006, 19). These scholars included Black Arts Movement literary giant Leroi Jones (also known as Amiri Baraka) and his work Blues People (1963), music historian Eileen Southern and her work The Music of Black Americans: A History ([1971] 1997), and composer-vernacular music theorist Olly Wilson (1974, 1983), whose writings proved germane to the discussion of this article, teaching in the black music vernacular. While it still remained that scholars defined African-American music in quantitative terms, Wilson (1983) presented a rereading of black music in terms of its approaches to music in lieu of a list of its overarching musical traits. Of importance to a pedagogical model for teaching in the black music vernacular that I propose is one of Wilson's characterizations of African-American music practice: its heterogeneous sound ideal. Unlike the discussion of this concept as an approach by which sound consists of a juxtaposition of musical timbres, I contend that a heterogeneous sound ideal is not merely viewed as a conceptual approach to music making but rather it is foundational to a philosophy of music making among black musicians in general as will be discussed in this article. While scholars of black music do find that the presence of call and response and the use of the AAB song form are ubiquitous to African-American music, the mere absence of either has led some to erroneous assertions that a song may not be, for instance, a blues. An example of this allegation is Mamie Smith's Crazy Blues, which many critics have argued is not a blues in the formal sense due to its lack of an AAB song structure, an issue to which I will return later in the article. But using a black music vernacular approach in defining African-derived music undoubtedly eschews conventional understanding of musical sound, form, structure, and written note interpretation, as well as related pedagogies. As one scholar of black history and music points out, black vernacular music, for example, American jazz, regardless of a music score, is a performer's art rather than a art (Levine 1989, 8). When jazz pianist-composer Mary Lou Williams was asked how she learned black music vernacular styles like ragtime and jazz in general, she further supported the importance of the oral tradition over privileging the written note or composer's voice: My mother taught me all that. The spiritual and ragtime that I play, she taught me. Much different than the ragtime that [Scott] Joplin wrote. …

  Publisher

Frequent coauthors

• Tim Riley

  Cornell University

  77 shared

• Walter Everett

  University of Michigan–Ann Arbor

  77 shared

• Henry L. Carrigan

  University of Michigan–Ann Arbor

  77 shared

• Hannah M. Lewis

  77 shared

• Kenneth Womack

  77 shared

• Inconvenient Lonnie

  Monmouth University

  25 shared

• Timothy R. Mangin

  1 shared

• Wayne Marshall

  University of Rochester

  1 shared

Education

• Ph.D., African American Studies

  University of California, Los Angeles

  1992

• M.A., African American Studies

  University of California, Los Angeles

  1988

• B.A., African American Studies

  University of California, Los Angeles

  1985

Awards & honors

• CHOICE award for outstanding academic book titles for Rap Mu…
• NAACP Image Award in the category of "Outstanding World Musi…
• Global Music Award Silver Medal for "Outstanding Achievement…
• Indiana University’s Herman C. Hudson Alumni Award
• Honorary Membership in the Society for Ethnomusicology