Newsletter
Fall
2002 Volume XXXII, No.
1
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Reviews
Country and Gospel Notes |
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Gendering Jazz Narratives
by Susan C. Cook
Three recent books present
underexplored and unexpected vantage points from which to re-encounter the jazz
terrain, a landscape that all too often has been reproduced as a picture
perfect postcard suitable for the jazz tourist: Angela Y. Davis’s Blues
Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie
Holiday (Vintage, 1998; $15); David Margolick’s Strange Fruit:
Billie Holiday, Café Society, and an Early Cry for Civil Rights
(Running Press, 2000; $12); and Sherrie Tucker’s Swing Shift:
“All-Girl” Bands of the 1940s (Duke University Press, 2000; $19). The
three books play off each other in interesting ways. Billie Holiday’s
masterpiece “Strange Fruit” serves as the point of departure for David
Margolick’s musing while her life and career are central to Angela Y. Davis’s
interpretation of black feminism. Holiday’s public embodiment of black
glamour as well as her model of black female professionalism informs the
public personas and activities of Tucker’s “all-girl” bands. Margolick and
Tucker both share journalist credentials, while Tucker’s acknowledged
graduate study with Davis is apparent in their shared commitment to the
centrality of race and gender to jazz scholarship. Angela Y. Davis’s Blues Legacies and
Black Feminism is the oldest of the three books and calls attention to
its refreshing point of view—black feminism—in its title. Davis spends much
of the opening three chapters exploring the contextual realities of race and
gender and what bringing them together means. Her writing in these early
chapters can be thought-provoking: “Sexuality thus was one of the most
tangible domains in which emancipation was acted upon and through which its
meanings were expressed. Sovereignty in sexual matters marked an important
divide between life during slavery and life after emancipation.” After laying
out her claims for taking seriously the socially-shaping roles of black women
in popular culture, Davis proceeds to explore the public careers of Ma
Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday, presenting a kind of triumvirate of
black feminist womanhood centered in the personal lives and working-class
communities of these performers. Especially illuminating are Davis’s
explorations of the politics and power of post-slavery black sexuality, as
suggested in the above quotation, and its problematic nature for Americans
both black and white. While there is much to celebrate about
this work, the high promise of the opening chapters does not carry through,
and the book quite literally fades away with a full 158 pages of transcribed
lyrics. This transparent reliance on lyrics, admittedly many of which have not
been transcribed, is problematic for many reasons, not the least of which is
that it suggests that the celebrated musicking of these women can be reduced
to lyrics shorn of their aurality. Worse, it suggests that these women
somehow are their texts, that their “real” autobiographical stories are the
ones they shared in public, even when it is unclear what control they had
over their material. This is another version of the “just singing their
lives” trope that so often undercuts the agency of female performers. Overall
Davis’s analysis needs to be more nuanced in thinking through and challenging
the time-worn dualities that have marked the “bad boy/victim girl” discourses
of blues and jazz while ignoring race and gender politics. Billie Holiday and her performance of
“Strange Fruit,” much beloved by Davis, acts as the frame for David
Margolick’s slim text. Expanded from an essay that first appeared in Vanity
Fair, Margolick attempts a kind of thick description/reception history of
Abel Meeropol’s song and its multiple performances by Holiday. While drawing
on recent jazz scholarship—he quotes from Davis’s Blues Legacies,
although it’s unclear given other comments whether he’s actually read her or
not—Margolick probes what “Strange Fruit” and its atypical anti-lynching text
meant to Holiday and to her listeners over the years. I can well imagine that
readers of Vanity Fair aren’t keen on footnotes. However, his choice
to move to a book venue, with a forward by Hilton Als and other claims to
credibility, demands review of his research methodology. Margolick quotes
from performers who remember a Holiday performance, for example, but he
doesn’t indicate whether he did the interview or took it from another source.
To cite another instance, in Margolick’s discussion of the radio censorship
of “Strange Fruit,” he mentions a photograph of a recording marked “not for
airplay,” but fails to attribute the picture to the Ladyslipper Music
Catalogue, a source I steered him to. This sort of inadequate sourcing is
pervasive throughout the work, calling into question the quality of the
information and validity of Maragolick’s interpretations. Without
bibliography or notes, how do we know where and how he came to his material?
Of more concern, what other insights and information has he appropriated from
the work of others without the expected acknowledgment? The star here is Sherrie Tucker, and it
would be hard to over-praise Swing Shift: “All-Girl” Bands of the 1940s
for the way it opens up unexpected terrain and asks fresh new questions.
Tucker takes her readers on a literal journey as we join the busloads of
female musicians, from the The Prairie View Co-eds to the Sharon Rogers
All-Girl Band, who attempted to make the daunting trip from girl musician to
professional wage earner during the high times of the 1940s. Meticulously
researched and sourced, cogently argued, and generally written with an ear
and eye for the general public, it is without a doubt one of the best books
on jazz or American music to come out in the last five years. Tucker relies
on oral histories, largely without access to recordings, to construct her
jazz narrative, as the women at the center of her study rarely attained
access to this racially and gender shaped technology of historical
legitimacy. And yet her study invests the musicking of these often inaudible
performers with more significance and subjects it to more critical scrutiny
than does Davis’s with her pages of lyrics as she makes her case for adding
these women and their experiences to our accepted history of jazz. After an opening chapter dealing head-on
with the erasure of women from the dominant studies of jazz and the role of
women workers and the wartime “swing shift,” Tucker begins her case studies
with Phil Spitalny and His Hour of Charm Orchestra. After cheering her
brilliant critique of jazz scholarship, I wondered about the choice of Phil
Spitalny and his ensemble. Here was a group I’d long heard about, but had
never given much thought to, content to accept the dominant view that these
musicians were irrelevant. Tucker’s analysis brought me up short and forced
me to face my own questionable presumptions about the musical activities of
Spitalny’s talented musicians, who undertook their work with the utmost
seriousness of purpose. In her refusal to take anything for granted,
especially the high-stakes of leisure time activities and entertainment,
Tucker repeatedly immerses the reader in the multiple contradictions of
“girl” musicians and working women, of sounding “black” and looking “white,”
of maintaining femininity and demanding equity, of going on the road and
staying home, and of what wartime work meant for women and for men. This is a
crucial book for anyone interested in the complicated workings of American
popular musical life. No one should miss this bus ride. —University of Wisconsin at Madison |