Big band \u201cswing\u201d was king throughout the late 1930s and early 1940s. Swing skyrocketed as \u201cmillions of Americans, isolated from loved ones and far from home, sought diversion, comfort, and social contact through music and dance\u201d during the onslaught of World War II. (p.35). Histories of jazz and swing during this time turn up the volume on the contributions of musicians like Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington, Count Bassie, and Cab Calloway, while largely turning down the volume on contributions of female musicians.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As the war effort siphoned male musicians and evaporated the Big Bands, female musicians, as well as all-girl ensembles, stepped up to fill the void in Big Band supply for a demanding nation. Sherrie Tucker\u2019s Swing Shift: \u201cAll-Girl\u201d Bands of the 1940s <\/em>challenges this erasure by centering the oral histories of women who lived and played the changes of that time. Tucker combines cultural analysis, ethnomusicology, and jazz studies with over 100 oral histories of female musicians in all-girl big bands to examine this erasure. The extensive oral histories are not simply filler notes but serve as tonics for Tucker\u2019s analytical chords. Tucker’s work illustrates how historians can use oral histories to spotlight the tensions between memory versus media, personal experience versus dominant cultural myths, and cultural labor versus professional artistry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Firstly, Tucker uses oral histories to challenge dominant narratives about all-girl bands playing swing during the late 1930’s and 1940’s. \u201cThe attitude that women musicians were pitching in for the war effort pervaded the publicity and reviews of the most successful all-girl bands,\u201d Tucker writes, which reinforced an idea of amateur as well as impermanence. Wartime publicity often cast these groups as symbols of patriotic unity or as glamorous diversions for male soldiers. However, Tucker\u2019s interviewees justifiably \u201cmaintained self-identities as patriots and professionals.\u201d (p. 41). School and family provided structured musical training for most of Tucker\u2019s interviewees. Martha Young, for example, \u201cgrew up amid an entire family of jazz musicians, including her mother saxophonist Irma Young.\u201d (pg. 55). After classical training, Jam sessions allowed musicians like Helen Cole, Argie Mae Edwards (Medearis), and Clora Bryant to sharpen their jazz\/swing skills, while vaudeville theatres provided many interviewees with practical experience during the preceding decades. Interviewee Lillian Carter\u2019s (Wilson) plea, \u201cWe were real <\/em>musicians. I mean, we were not just standing there,\u201d reinforces the salient burden for women to prove their worth during that period, as well as for the rest of the century. (p. 56). They in fact did not just stand there \u2013 they played the same types of music and instruments as the men\u2019s bands. Moreover, they were anything but impermanent. After the official \u201cswing\u201d era, these musicians continued in the music industry. Many maintained their careers in the succeeding decades \u201cin combos, as singles, on television, in cocktail lounges, as music teachers, as church musicians\u201d regardless of family obligations. (p.322). Clora Bryant, for example, toured with her children in 1948 and appeared on a television variety show in 1951, and was popular on the nightclub circuit throughout North America. Other women became band directors and still toured well into their 80\u2019s, like Velzoe Brown.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Secondly, Tucker demonstrates how oral history reasserts the female musician\u2019s cultural labor within the professional artistry of playing Swing music. Band directors like Phil Spitalny nurtured a public image of his female musicians, emphasizing charm and difference. In a 1938 Etude Magazine <\/em>interview, Spitalney claimed he \u201c’found that light music, to be entirely pleasing, must give the listener an impression of sweetness, of charm,\u201d before rhetorically asking \u201cwhere in the world can you find a better exponent of charm than a charming young woman?’\u201d (p.81). This focus on women perceiving the female musicians as not competing with men or even working undercut the tireless work they put into their craft. Working for Spitalny, for example, required Saturday rehearsals, Sunday programming until 10:00 p.m., six shows at the Paramount Theatre with little time to sleep or nap. \u201c\u2018It required much work and patience,\u2019\u201d Vernel Wells recalled, \u201c\u2018So we played and played and played until we didn\u2019t have any lip left,\u2019\u201d alongside taking lessons from the New York Philharmonic and New York Symphony, which contradicted Spitalny\u2019s \u201cclaim that he all he asked of his musicians was to \u2018simply go on being charming women.\u2019\u201d (p.84).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Thirdly, Tucker\u2019s use of oral history reveals hidden histories and interrogates memory \u2013 how these musicians remembered their time. Despite law enforcement of Jim Crow laws harassing Black or multi-ethnic all-girl bands, some interviewees chose to remember the experience differently. Helen Jones, for example, \u201ccredited her band experiences with getting her out of a lonely living situation into a community that could serve as a surrogate family,\u201d while Laura Bohle (Sias) capitalized \u201cher trip with Ada Leonard\u2019s band through Rochester to audition for the Eastman School of Music \u2013 winning a full scholarship and a recommendation for the Rochester Philharmonic.\u201d (p.67-8). Furthermore, they reveal unique obstacles to female musicians like sexual harassment. Although the band leader Phil Spitalny uplifted his musicians publicly, \u201che apparently sometimes auditioned her in his underwear.\u201d (p.92). One interviewee recalled such a situation in her audition: \u201c’He showed up in a pair of shorts (WINTER TIME!) with those spindly legs, and I almost laughed in his face. I said, \u201cIf you want to hear me play just go down the street Loew\u2019s State and catch a show.\u201d I rushed out of there before he could get fresh with me.\u2019\u201d (p.93). In this situation, Tucker offers a glimpse into the process of obtaining oral histories regarding sensitive content. She recounts how some interviewees did not provide consent to be recorded talking about this subject, and reveals another power of oral histories, where others realized how many other women underwent similar circumstances in their careers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Tucker excellently illustrates how historians can employ oral histories to listen for the dissonant notes in the cultural history sheet music, but also how to do it. She employs oral histories to recover forgotten stories, challenge cultural myths, center marginalized voices, and acknowledge the complexity of memory. This demonstrates the power of oral history to broaden narratives of American music and culture from monophonic to polyphonic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n References: Tucker, Sherrie. Swing Shift: \u201cAll-Girl\u201d Bands of the 1940s. Duke University Press, 2000.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n P.S. – In her work, Tucker discusses the stresses female musicians experienced during the late 1930s and 1940s about their identities. They were infantilized, with favorable reviews “crafted along the lines of ubiquitous amazement that women could play at all,” and sexualized, with advertisements promoting them as “‘sultry sirens of swing'” or “‘lovely loreleis of rhythm.'” (p. 294). Tucker illustrates how these musicians owned their identities as artists equal to male musicians through hard work, but leaves out how these musicians empowered more personal (or sexual) identities. She asks if “all-women bands [provided] social spaces for some women musicians to explore new sexual freedom and identities during this time of relative mobility and loosened gender and sex roles and rules?” (p. 295). She recounts the difficulty in retrieving these answers from justifiably guarded musicians and questions what to do when she receives that information, often secondhand or coded. That questioning reminded me of a similar question I had when curating a 6-gallery, 2-floor permanent exhibition about George Eastman (founder of Eastman-Kodak Company) at the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, NY. Rochesterians certainly have theories about his sexuality, and according to focus groups, they were eager to learn about it, especially from members of the LGBTQIA+ community. The theories relied on stereotypes, including his preference for privacy, his marital status (unmarried\/eternal bachelor), his love of music, the fact that his closest companions were younger married women (similar to Truman Capote’s “Swans”), and his subscription to a new magazine called “Vogue.” However, Eastman was a rugged outdoorsman and naturalist, with a recorded past of dating women as well as zero rumors of homosexuality in the small West New York town. As I’m sure every Eastman historian from Lawrence Bachmann to Elizabeth Brayer must have thought, I considered what I would do if I learned that information in my research. Do I publish it? Is it my right? To paraphrase Tucker, can I assume the man who commodified memory would want to be valorized as a gay forefather? (p.330). If he was in fact gay, he chose not to promote it for reasons. Yet, by not publishing it (should it be true), was I denying LGBTQIA+ Rochesterians (as well as those around the world) a famous historical representation and jeopardizing the already-scant trust the community holds for the increasingly exclusionary museum? Did knowing publication of this information would financially benefit the museum by sparking consumer interest taint the release of that private information? Studying George Eastman for 18 months, I can say there is no evidence of his sexuality, but it is not solved either way. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Big band \u201cswing\u201d was king throughout the late 1930s and early 1940s. Swing skyrocketed as \u201cmillions of Americans, isolated from loved ones and far from home, sought diversion, comfort, and social contact through music and dance\u201d during the onslaught of World War II. (p.35). Histories of jazz and swing during this time turn up the … <\/p>\n