February 24, 2021
If there were any critic or collector who would have been an especially passionate steward of Zora Neale Hurston’s historic recordings, it probably would have been the Jewish feminist activist, intellectual, and entrepreneur Rosetta Reitz (pronounced “rights”). The dynamic Reitz who proudly wore both such hats throughout her trailblazing career would have likely gone to great lengths to care for, study, protect, and preserve Hurston’s sound scholarship. But Reitz’s voluminous archive surprisingly shows little trace of Hurston’s labors. Her absence from the feminist public historian’s records perhaps says everything about the extent of Hurston’s obscurity as a sound archivist in the 1970s since Reitz was a beast of a collector, a superwonk who, above all else, devoted her life to Black women’s sonic cultures, and a woman who would ultimately produce some of the most extensive and trenchant critical thought and writing about Black women musicians that had ever been published.