David McCain with Laurie Stras
Boswell Scholar Honored by ASCAP
The Boz was out in force on December 9th, 2008 when University of Southampton Senior Lecturer, Dr. Laurie Stras, received ASCAPs prestigious Deems Taylor Award for her article, White Face, Black Voice: Race, Gender, and Region in the Music of Boswell Sisters," published by Journal of the Society for American Music.
The ceremony, held in the Jazz at Lincoln Center studios overlooking Columbus Square in New York City, honored a wide array of contributors for outstanding print, broadcast and new media coverage of music. Dr. Stras was among a group that included individuals as diverse as TV’s Mr. Rogers and Aniruddh D. Patel who wrote the scientific tome Music, Language and the Brain.
Debbie Davis, Cynthia Lucas, Holley Bendtsen,
David McCain and Yvette Voelker onstage at
Jazz at Lincoln Center
American born, Stras was surrounded by her two families: those who she is bound to by blood and those with whom she shares the Boz. In a gesture that created one of the highlights of the ceremony, Dr. Stras arranged for the Pfister Sisters to perform. Their masterful interpretation of “Everybody Loves My Baby” drew gasps from the audience of New York songwriters and musicians.
Congratulations Laurie, from the gang at Bozzies.com
The Boswells’ visual and musical racial ambiguity, and indeed by their very existence as publicly creative women in jazz, had the potential to create anxiety for the press, the profession, and the public.
