Minnie Riperton’s Come to My Garden

Abstract

Research Article| June 01 2023 Minnie Riperton’s Come to My Garden Brittnay L. Proctor, PhD Brittnay L. Proctor, PhD School of Media Studies, The New School Brittnay L. Proctor is a Mellon post-doctoral fellow/assistant professor of race and media in the School of Media Studies at The New School. Her research interests include black studies; black popular music, black feminist theory, sound studies, visual culture, and performance. Her work has been published in the Journal of Popular Music Studies, The Journal of Popular Culture, American Literature, Sounding Out!, Feminist Formations, Hyped on Melancholy, African American Review, Reviews in Digital Humanities, and ASAP/Journal. She is the author of Minnie Riperton’s Come to My Garden (Bloomsbury Press: 33 1/3 Series). She is also working on a second book manuscript, which draws on LP records and Compact Discs to trace the sonic and visual discourses of gender and sexuality in funk music. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of Popular Music Studies (2023) 35 (2): 6–9. https://doi.org/10.1525/jpms.2023.35.2.6 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Brittnay L. Proctor; Minnie Riperton’s Come to My Garden. Journal of Popular Music Studies 1 June 2023; 35 (2): 6–9. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jpms.2023.35.2.6 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentJournal of Popular Music Studies Search If the garden can be used as a metaphor for Black women’s creativity and self-preservation, Minnie Riperton’s sonic garden reminds us that black womanhood is not merely self-evident but produced through praxis engendered by creating, cultivating, and tending, in this instance, to one’s garden. We might consider how Riperton’s vocal performance of the place of the garden and its figurative use throughout the album pose an antagonism to genre: both as a technique for taxonomizing black music and the codification of gender as the collapse between sex as biology and gender (the production of gender dimorphism as the discrete categories of “man” and “woman”). Against “genre” and toward the place of the garden, the black avant-garde tenets of Come to My Garden are rooted in Riperton’s blurring of Charles Stepney’s “written” composition and her own improvisational ad libs. The “phonic substance” of her vocal performance becomes a “visual manifestation” of... You do not currently have access to this content.