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This Issue: Inside This Issue Katrina and the New Jazz Orthodoxy by Salim Washington Dusty Springfield and the Motown Invasion by Annie J. Randall Review: Searching for Robert Johnson by Nathan W. Pearson Review: From Paris to Peoria by Nancy Newman |
“White Woman” as Jazz
Collector in the Film New Orleans (1947) by Sherrie Tucker
Dorothy
Patrick, Arturo de Cordova, Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, and other
musicians in New Orleans (1947) “The
music I’ve been singing, so traditional, it was new once. And I’ve been learning to make it mine. But this!
This music is mine already!”1 So
gushes Miralee Smith, the white, opera-singing, jazz-smitten ingénue played by Dorothy Patrick in
the 1947 film New Orleans, set in 1917. Despite having spent a good deal of the
scene talking over the collective improvisation of Louis Armstrong, Kid Ory,
Zutty Singleton and other musicians, Miralee finds her
attraction to “authentic New Orleans jazz” rising to a crescendo. Especially moved by the film’s theme
song, “Do You Know What it Means to Miss New Orleans,” as sung by
Endie, her black maid (played with palpable unhappiness by Billie Holiday in
her only role in a feature motion picture), Miralee rises, eyes glowing,
cheeks flushed, and declares, “I’m going to sing that New Orleans
song!” For this act of white lady impropriety, Miralee is
bounced from the Basin Street club.
Such a rebuff would crush many a die-hard jazz fan, but not Miralee,
whose desire now burns hotter than Buddy Bolden’s trumpet calling the
children back home. This music is hers! She simply must feel the song of her
black maid moving through her own white lady body, as indeed, she will,
before this musical romance is over.
The grand finale finds her singing the song from the concert hall
stage, making a “lady out of jazz” like Paul Whiteman. Until recently, the only parts of New Orleans I
had seen were the musical clips containing Billie Holiday—how awful to
see her in the maid’s uniform, but oh, how her singing transcended
Hollywood’s limitations—and Louis Armstrong, leading a
“Trad” revivalist’s dream team of New Orleans musicians.
The consensus of jazz and film critics, historians, and aficionados is that
with the exception of the musical sequences, the film is, as Donald Bogle
puts it, “a dreary pedestrian mess.” Writes Bogle, “Although the story is
supposedly about jazz’s rise to mainstream acceptance, the real jazz
innovators—Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday—are neatly relegated
to the sidelines while the plot follows the lives of the lead white
characters, who are uniformly bland.”2 While I heartily agree with Bogle’s critical
assessment, I would argue that the juxtaposition of bland white characters
with brilliant black musicians is not at all at odds with the racial project
of the film, of “Trad” fans of the 1940s, or of much jazz
appreciation since then.3 White blandness and black affect, in fact,
are not incidental to this film. The characters with which the white target audience is invited to identify
are united by their weariness of European high culture and by their
enthusiasm for jazz as played by black musicians. There is something, in other words, about
the failure of the film that works in favor of its message: the redemptive promise of authentic black
New Orleans jazz for the bodies and souls of white Americans. It isn’t enough to critique this film as musically
“bright” and “dramatically… a
‘dud’” (to cite the headline that didn’t do justice
to Leonard Feather’s explicitly anti-racist review). These performances of bland white
characters gaping at creative black musicking are enactments of power; acts
facilitated in large part through a particular construction of white
womanhood as unaware, or innocent, of her social power.4 To face the entire film, rather than just
the musical sequences starring the black jazz musicians, compels us to
consider the curious efficacy of the “white lady” in that very
enactment of jazz appropriation analyzed in jazz studies as a white
masculinist routine. We in jazz
studies have gotten adept at wagging our fingers at the unconscious
primitivism of figures such as Mezz Mezzrow, Norman Mailer, and Jack Kerouac. And women-in-jazz historians like me have
been far more interested in recovering women jazz musicians of any race as
forgotten historical actors than in retrieving lost histories of white women
as jazz appropriators, symbolic or otherwise. Yet acknowledging such
appropriation is central to appreciating the cultural politics of a film like
New Orleans. Krin Gabbard has identified the recurring figure of the
“Jazz Nerd” as a white man who can’t bear any gaps in his
collection, and who develops an outside-the-mainstream masculine identity
through amassing, organizing, and memorizing jazz records, especially those
of black men whom the “Jazz Nerd” admires as “hip.”5 Ingrid Monson cautions that the historical
problem with “white hipness” is its tendency to project white
desires for affect, authenticity, and sexuality onto black bodies and black
music—so that even when the “hipster” is sincere in loving
jazz, he or she may be reproducing elements of the very aspects of dominant
constructions of race that buoy white supremacist ideology. Monson draws from Eric Lott’s
analysis of the continuation of minstrelsy through bohemianism in white
men’s hipness, but she also notes that “[m]any white women have
enjoyed the reputation of black men and women for hypersexuality,”
adding, that, “[a]ttention to the particular pathways of identification
would no doubt illuminate the cultural issue further.”6 To critically unpack the “pathways of
identification” available to jazz-loving white women historically, we
need much more information about white women as minstrel performers and
audience members, as bohemians, and as fans of black music.7 Jayna Brown writes that what white women
stood to gain from minstrel performance was “conditional access to
realms of expressive freedoms they were
otherwise forbidden.”8 Many white women jazz fans would reject any analyses of their devotion
to jazz as appropriation, and understandably so. Yet white womanhood has certainly shaped my
own pathway of identification as a jazz fan, and jazz seemed to offer what
felt like an “escape” from the social position I continue to
inhabit, which, of course, has its privileges in a racist culture. Part of my responsibility, then, as a white
woman jazz fan is to lose my innocence about the pathways of identification I
inherit. I may not identify
with Miralee’s jazz desire, but I need to know its history. Miralee knows nothing about jazz, except that it is
hers. If “hip” means
“in the know,” then “hip” she is not. How does her desire drive this narrative
about white jazz love? I want to make
it clear that I am not arguing that Miralee Smith reveals what white
upper-class northern U.S. women jazz fans were really like in 1947 or
at any other time. But this
representation is relevant towards an understanding about white womanhood and
jazz desire. What I want to argue is that
this performance tells us something about cultural legibility of one of kind
white woman figure, who, in this case, obscures
a black woman’s performance, and that the cultural ubiquity of
the trope of white woman that she performs makes it difficult to know about,
imagine, and perhaps even to become another kind of white woman jazz
fan. I’m anchoring my reading in Ruth
Frankenberg’s analysis of the recurring, co-constructed and powerful
“family of tropes” in which White Woman is characterized as
vulnerable, innocent, sexually pure, enabling White Man’s cultural
value as protector of white womanhood.
The trope of Man of Color shores up these roles by standing in as
white woman’s sexual predator—what Angela Davis has called the Myth of the Black Rapist. (Alternately, he
is rendered sexless and powerless, as in Uncle Tom’s benign friendship
with Little Eva.) The trope of Woman of Color has the thankless job of
enhancing White Woman’s purity by representing everything she is not
supposed to be: “seductress, fertile, unhygienic” who is
“always on a slippery slope from exotic beauty to unfemininity and
ugliness.”9 Throughout it all, White Woman must remain
unsullied by the knowledge that her social position is powerful. The power of these tropes is not in their accurate
reflection of who we are, but in their efficacy in justifying hierarchical
social relations, and, as Frankenberg puts it, in the fact that they
“continue to enlist” actual people into their service with
“varying degrees of consciousness and unconsciousness….”10 The family of tropes, for example, makes it
very easy for actual white women to become unknowing agents of racism while
identifying as innocent and respectable.11 Hilary Harris posits that “the
imagining and performing” of a genuinely “antiracist white
womanhood” could only be achieved through tactics by which white women
“fail” at the trope of White Woman.12 The white singer in New Orleans animates a
jazz-liking white woman who succeeds at the trope of White Woman, and
therefore supports the racial hierarchy while thinking she is championing
black culture. I call this figure the
“Jazz Virgin,” a white woman character who is stirred by what she
hears in black music—which in this film
is construed as sexuality, authenticity, emotion, newness,
modernity—while other characters serve as her anxious
protectors. 13 In
this film, it is not only white men who protect white womanhood, but all characters: a
black male jazz musician played by Louis Armstrong; a Creole gambling hall
owner and Miralee’s love interest, Nick Duquesnes, played by Mexican
actor Arturo de Cordova; and the singing black maid played by Billie
Holiday. Repeatedly, other characters
try to prevent jazz from entering Miralee’s body, or from entering the
wrong parts of her body, or to prevent the wrong parts of the music from
entering her body. Her protectors know
that “too much jazz” signals danger—criminality, sexuality,
impurity—and with them, the threat to topple the white woman from her
pedestal.14 The character who is
most ambivalent about the pedestal is another white woman who represents an
alternative to the “Jazz Virgin”—predictably, it is the
“Jazz Whore,” a fallen white woman aptly named Grace, who as a
result of too much jazz, drink, and sex, loses her social position and
is cinematically punished by getting hit by a car. The fallen Grace is
dark-haired and has a French surname, and so like Duquesnes, she is Creole,
not quite American, not quite white.
What will happen to innocent white Anglo-America if jazz enters Miralee’s
body? We are first introduced to Miralee when her boat from
Baltimore pulls into the port of New Orleans as Louis Armstrong plays in a
band on the pier. Her entrée to jazz
appreciation is her training as a singer of European art songs. From the moment we meet her, she is drawn
to jazz without knowing what it is. As
a “Jazz Virgin,” her wide-open ears are a tabula rasa. We recognize Armstrong. The chaperon hears danger, crime, and poor
taste. Miralee hears Armstrong’s
sound, even identifies his instrument, but affirms her defining innocence
when she exclaims: “That cornet in that wagon, did you ever hear
anything like it?” She is
resolutely a different kind of a jazz listener than the Nerd, who has
heard something like it, knows that it’s Armstrong, and can name all
the sidemen. This image of Miralee continues when she sets foot in her
new home in New Orleans. Again, she
leads with her fine-tuned yet jazz-innocent ears, drawn this time to the
sound of Endie’s/Billie Holiday’s voice. Again, she is protected—this time by
two older white women, her chaperon and mother—who act as culture
police, and do their best to enforce racial hierarchy. Nonetheless, when the protectors of white
womanhood leave the room, the budding sexuality of the “Jazz Virgin”
is once again apparent as she begs for more song. At the sound of
Endie’s voice, Miralee seems physically stimulated. She disobeys her mother, yet upholds and
modernizes conventions of white power when she overrules Endie’s own
attempts to protect white womanhood.
She has commanded her to sing.
Now she playfully orders her to take her “slumming.” Miralee’s pathway to jazz, then, trades on a race-
and class-naturalized mistress-maid relationship, via “slumming,”
a mode of white privilege that, like other forms of tourism, affirms
hierarchy through exoticizing difference.
Krin Gabbard has written about the erotic charge between Louis
Armstrong and Billie Holiday in the musical scenes in New Orleans, but
in my reading, the charge belongs solely to Miralee, whose female gaze we
watch and adopt by the end of the scene.
As she descends into the depths of the “Orpheum Cabaret,”
she can barely contain her physical excitement. She gingerly steps into the club, eyes, and
lips moist, face aglow. The scene is
remarkable for its situating of female pleasure in a jazz scene, but
complicated in the sense that what enables white female pleasure is the
fetishizing of black men and a black woman.
When Endie finishes her song, Miralee plies Nick with breathless questions
that suggest her impending loss of innocence, such as, “Where does such
music come from?” Nick begins to
narrate the miracle of jazz until the once innocent and now fallen Grace
appears in the doorway. The climax of
the scene comes when Miralee, now consumed with her desire to feel
Endie’s song emanating from her own body, rushes for the stage. She is “rescued” by Nick, who
expels her from the club. The rest of the film is spent reconciling
Miralee’s epiphany that jazz belongs to her, with concerns that her
love of jazz may lead to the loss of other entitlements for her and other
white characters. Like the “Jazz Nerd,” the “Jazz
Virgin” collects, and in the final scene, Miralee triumphs at New
York’s Symphony Hall, delivering Endie’s song in her best bel
canto belt (dubbed by white lyric soprano Theodora Lynch). Not an old stock aristocrat like her
mother, indebted to European notions of high culture, Miralee proves herself
as a modern national subject, for whom shedding Italian art songs and claiming
jazz as her own enacts a gendered story of innocent imperialism. We hear a
little more chest resonance in the finale than in Miralee’s European
art song renditions and English instead of Italian, but we do not hear signs
of blackness such as blue notes, speech effects, syncopation, or improvised
turns of phrasing and melody that would popularize other white women singers
such as the Boswell Sisters from New Orleans, who also learned about black
music from their maids. Though referred to throughout the film as a blues,
“Do You Know What it Means to Miss New Orleans” is a popular song
written especially for this film, and is full of southern pastoral nostalgia scathingly critiqued in Abel
Meeropol’s lyrics to “Strange Fruit.” Backed by an all-white symphony orchestra
and an all-white jazz orchestra (Woody Herman’s first Herd), Miralee
woos an all-white concert-going audience to share her epiphany that
this music belongs to them, too. In
the final scenes of New Orleans, neither Billie Holiday nor the black
jazz instrumentalists who so inspired Miralee throughout the first half of
the film are seen or heard. As film
scholars have documented, while the black musicians
were supposed to appear in an integrated finale, McCarthy-era Hollywood would
not allow it.15 And so, a white woman presents a nostalgic
song about a happy South stolen from her black maid, thus transforming jazz
into respectable American culture, and the film swells to its musical big finish without apology or even apparent
awareness that one might be called for.
It is typical white-boy-meets-black-music cinematic jazz fare, as
analyzed by Gabbard, in which sincere white
devotees rescue jazz from black obscurity by trumpeting it from white concert
hall stages.16 Only this time, the colonizing white boy
with a (dubbed) horn is a colonizing white girl with a (dubbed) voice. While painful to watch, the film New Orleans
encourages us to think critically about jazz desire among those who wish to
oppose legacies of cultural imperialism, racial injustice, sexism, and
poverty. For me, this involves
interrogating the spheres of jazz scholarship, including women-in-jazz
scholarship, and jazz fandom that I myself inhabit. The tendency of jazz discourse to occlude
ongoing histories of injustice and inequality is a pernicious one. A century of national love for New Orleans
as the birthplace of jazz, for instance, did little to rectify a century of
cohabitation of jazz tourism and institutional neglect of poor and black
lives in the most flood-vulnerable areas of the city and the wider Gulf
region.17 The lyric “Do you
Know What it Means to Miss New Orleans” will never mean quite the same
after Hurricane Katrina, but the root of its tragic irony—the
idealization of moss-draped, gumbo-rich, all-male, color-blind egalitarian
jam sessions—and concurrent neglect of ongoing structures of race- and
class-based inequities—troubles a century of jazz desire. —University of Kansas Notes 1 New Orleans (1947), dir Arthur Lubin.
All quotes are taken from the Kino DVD release (2000). 2 Donald Bogle, “Louis Armstrong: The
Films,” in Louis Armstrong: A
Cultural Legacy, ed. Marc H. Miller (Queens Museum of Art/University of
Washington Press, 1994), 147. 3 Made in the 1940s, this film takes a clear
side in the “Jazz Wars” raging at the time. “Trad” fans, also called
“Mouldy Figs,” invested in early New Orleans jazz as a
traditional folk music. See Bernard
Gendron’s “Mouldy Figs and Jazz at War (1942-1946),” Jazz
Among the Discourses, ed. Krin Gabbard (Duke University Press, 1995),
31-56. 4 Leonard Feather, “The Reel Armstrong:
Musically, New Orleans is a Bright Film; Dramatically, It’s a
Dud,” Metronome (April 1947), 43. 5 Krin Gabbard, Black Magic, White
Hollywood, and African American Culture (Rutgers University Press, 2004). 6 Ingrid Monson, “The Problem with White Hipness: Race, Gender, and Cultural
Conceptions in Jazz Historical Discourse,” Journal of the
American Musicological Society XLVIII/3 (Fall 1995), 405. 7 The emerging scholarship on women and
minstrelsy includes Jayna Jennifer Brown, Babylon Girls: African American
Women Performers and the Making of the Modern, Ph.D. diss., Yale
University, 2001; Michele Wallace, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Before and
After the Jim Crow Era,” The Drama Review 44/1 (Spring 2000),
137-156; M. Alison Kiebler, Rank Ladies: Gender and Cultural Hierarchy in
American Vaudeville (University of North Carolina Press, 1999), and
Pamela Brown Lavitt, “‘First of the Red Hot Mamas:’ Coon
Shouting and the Jewish Ziegfeld Girl,” American Jewish History
87/4 (1999), 253-290. 8 Brown, Babylon Girls, 53. 9 Ruth Frankenberg, “Local Whitenesses,
Localizing Whiteness,” in Displacing Whiteness: Essays in Social and
Cultural Criticism, ed. Ruth Frankenberg (Duke University Press, 1997),
11-12. 10 Ibid., 11-12. 11 Ibid., 15. 12 Hilary Harris, “Failing ‘White
Woman’: Interrogating the Performance of Respectability,” Theatre
Journal 52/2 (2000), 183-209. 13 The jury is still out regarding the
frequency of this formula, though if we include jazz soundtracks in films
that aren’t literally “about” jazz, this plot is more
common than it might seem at first glance.
See Peter Stanfeld, “An Excursion into the Lower Depths:
Hollywood, Urban Primitivism, and St. Louis Blues, 1929-1937,” Cinema
Journal 41/2 (Winter 2002), 84-108. 14 Another fascinating representation of a
white woman’s love of jazz occurs in Syncopation (1942), dir.
William Dieterle. Kit’s father objects to her jazz piano aspirations,
so she transfers her love to a white male swing musician, who suffers a
moment of doubt when he worries that a more talented black musician is being
left in the dust of his own success.
Kit assures her boyfriend that he is modern, unlike their black friend,
who is “New Orleans.” Thanks to Krin Gabbard for introducing me
to this film. 15 Laurence Bergreen, Louis Armstrong: An
Extravangant Life (Broadway Books, 1997), 427-49. 16 In Jammin’ at the Margins: Jazz and
the American Cinema (University of Chicago Press, 1996), Krin Gabbard points
out that New Orleans is one of many Hollywood films that “wait until
the end to elevate white music over black music” (79). Other films with
this plot include The Fabulous Dorseys (1947), and The Benny
Goodman Story (1955) (80). 17 See Salim Washington’s article in this
issue of the Newsletter. ISAM home Who we
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