Journal of Popular Music Studies, Volume 20, Issue 2, Pages 166–193 A Jew Singing Like a Black Woman in Australia: Race, Ren´ ee Geyer, and Marcia Hines Jon Stratton Curtin University of Technology “[T]he strange thing is that the person who became the big blues singer in Australia, Ren´ ee Geyer, was white, and the person who became the big pop/rock performer was Marcia. I mean, they almost swapped roles.” Tony Hogarth, cofounder of Wizard Records. (Quoted in Dewey 2001: 117) To call Ren´ ee Geyer white, as Tony Hogarth does in the quotation I am using as the epigraph of this article, is to elide Geyer’s Jewishness and, with it, the complex positioning of Jews in post–World War II Australia. At the core of Geyer’s repertoire is soul and funk music, American styles deeply associated with African Americans. Martha Bayles has described soul music: “[R]hythmically, it asserts Afro-American complexity ... vocally, it asserts the power and expressiveness of gospel and blues ... lyrically, it asserts a broader range of emotion and experience’ (Bayles quoted in Inglis 2003: 230). Rickey Vincent has described funk this way: Funk is a musical mixture. Its most popular form is dance-tempo rhythm and blues-style music with the rhythmic interplay of instru- ments stretched to a dramatic level of complexity. Any number of different instruments or sound layers can be on various meters, but then suddenly all could tighten up and blurt one synchronized note or phrase, and then just as suddenly swing back into rhythmic interplay. (1996: 13) Marcia Hines is an African American who arrived in Australia shortly before her seventeenth birthday to take a role in the musical Hair in Sydney in 1970. Hines’s success as a singer, though, has not come through singing in the idiom of soul and funk. Rather, as Hogarth indicates, she has sung the kind of music with which white Australians were most familiar, ballads and