“I'd Rather [Sound] Blue”: Listening to Agency, Hybridity, and Intersectionality in the Vocal Recordings of Fanny Brice and Barbra Streisand

Abstract

AbstractThis article locates intersectionality, agency, and hybridity within the singing voices of Fanny Brice and Barbra Streisand by comparing recordings of “I'd Rather Be Blue,” “Second Hand Rose,” and “My Man” from the surviving Vitaphone reels of Brice's My Man (1928) with the audio from the Digital Versatile Disc (DVD) of Streisand's Funny Girl (1968). Brice and Streisand's virtuosic stylized vocal performances communicate particular classed, gendered, geographic, and racialized identities for audience consumption. This project aims to restore the sonic and aural to a body of scholarship on these performers that heretofore has focused primarily on the physical and visual. An untapped inroad for analysis lies in the sonic space between these two women, one of whom attempts to posthumously portray the other. By practicing close listening on these recordings and taking seriously the Jewish right to hybrid musical expression within and beyond the United States in the twentieth century, we can move past the essentializing discourses of the US racial binary to which Jews pose a definitional challenge, and open up further avenues for thinking about Jewish sonic difference generationally and contextually.