In jazz, the term “big ears” refers to the ability to hear and make meaning out of complex music. One needs “big ears” to make sense of improvisatory negotiations of tricky changes and multiple simultaneous lines and rhythms. “Big ears” are needed to hear dissonances and silences. They are needed to follow nuanced conversations between soloists; between soloists and rhythm sections; between music and other social realms; between multiply situated performers and audiences and institutions; and between the jazz at hand and jazz in history. If jazz was just about hitting the right notes, surviving the chord changes, and letting out the stops, jazz scholars, listeners, and even musicians would not need “big ears.”
…There are some areas in which meticulous historical work in jazz studies has managed to unsettle ideological understandings of jazz historiography. Much of this has involved locating jazz discourse in a history of primitivism, or in European and European American fantasies of exotic otherness, while documenting “lost” jazz practices that did not fit, and therefore do not appear, in dominant discourse. This type of scholarship…is not just about dueling canons, but about taking the canon apart to see what makes it tick, then trying to craft a different kind of historical narrative that contextualizes this ticking, along with other social, cultural, and political frameworks through which jazz has mattered. This work [is] important, not only because it will give us a more complete understanding of jazz history as a distinct narrative, but because it will increase our understandings of the societies for whom jazz has been meaningful.
Sherrie Tucker (2002)
Students of oral, labor, cultural, and sexual history should learn to “grow” their ears as well.
Feminist oral history is never just about “getting the story.” It’s about recognizing how power, positionality, and voice shape what gets told, how it is told, and what remains unsaid. Sherrie Tucker’s approach to oral history in Swing Shift (2000) and “When Subjects Don’t Come Out” (2002) models what feminist researchers describe as listening differently: treating silences and refusals not as gaps to be fixed, but as knowledge in their own right. Tucker leans into her narrators’ contradictions rather than smoothing them over: when accounts conflict or resist neat categorization, these moments reveal the multiple and often competing ways that people construct meaning about their lives. Instead of writing this off as this as a flaw in oral history, Tucker treats it as one of its strengths.
Likewise, Tucker refuses to erase the “messiness” of memory. In Swing Shift, women musicians at times recalled the same incidents in very different ways: for instance, one remembered racial tension on the road, while another described the same tour as harmonious. Rather than deciding which account was “accurate,” Tucker shows how memory itself is shaped by identity, later experience, and the politics of telling. This aligns with Alessandro Portelli’s (1991) argument that the value of oral history lies less in factual verification and more in the meanings attached to memory. For Tucker, memory’s contradictions are not a problem to solve but an opening to feminist interpretation.
Her chapter “When Subjects Don’t Come Out” takes this even further by questioning the assumption that researchers should always pursue disclosure — especially about sexuality. She notes that historians often enter interviews with the implicit desire that subjects will “finally” name themselves as queer, as if oral history’s objective is to uncover some ultimate truth. But what happens when narrators don’t? Tucker warns against the archival “closet,” where silence or ambiguity is read only as lacking data. Instead, she asks: what does it mean to respect refusal? To recognize that what is not said may reflect survival strategies, community norms, or simply the narrator’s right to privacy? This, too, is feminist practice: decentering the researcher’s expectations and honoring the autonomy of the narrator.
These methodological choices echo the principles set forth in Feminist Research Practice (2011), where oral history and focus groups are described as tools for amplifying marginalized voices in ways that challenge dominant narratives. The text emphasizes three commitments: awareness of power dynamics, ethical responsibility, and collaborative knowledge-making. Tucker embodies all three of these principles. She acknowledges her own positionality as a white feminist historian writing about women of color of an older generation; she resists imposing tidy conclusions that might overshadow narrators’ voices; and she considers the ethical stakes of how stories circulate in public memory.
What I find especially compelling is Tucker’s attention to silence as a form of data. She reminds us that narrators’ pauses, contradictions, or refusals to answer are not voids but more like productive absences that tell us something about historical context and lived experience. For instance, when some musicians avoided directly naming (what we’d consider today to be) sexual harassment they experienced on the road, Tucker doesn’t interpret that as denial. Instead, she highlights how gendered expectations of propriety shaped what women felt they could safely say in an interview, even decades later. This is feminist oral history at its sharpest: not extracting “confessions,” but situating speech within structures of power.
By weaving together oral testimony, archival fragments, and her own reflexive awareness, Tucker shows that feminist oral history is not only about recovering “lost” voices. It is about cultivating responsibility in how we listen, interpret, and represent. She reminds us that recovery without reflexivity risks exploitation — a kind of academic mining of marginalized lives. Listening differently, developing “big ears” (a term she adopted in a chapter penned two years after Swing Shift’s publication) means being accountable to the conditions under which people speak, and to the silences that accompany their words.
Tucker’s work reframes what counts as valuable historical knowledge. Feminist oral history is not simply additive — plugging women or queer people into existing narratives — but transformative, forcing us to rethink what kind of evidence matters. Silence matters. Contradiction matters. Ambiguity matters. And as Tucker demonstrates, honoring these dimensions is not methodological weakness but feminist rigor.
Tucker pushes oral history beyond recovery into responsibility. It’s not enough to surface marginalized voices if we then force them into neat categories that suit our pre-ordained frameworks. Feminist oral history, as Tucker practices it, insists on listening with humility, with ears big enough to hear the stories and the silences and the spaces in between.
Works Referenced
Hesse-Biber, S. N. & Leavy, PN. (2013). Feminist research practice: A primer. Sage Publications, Inc.
Portelli, A. (1991). What makes oral history different. In The death of Luigi Trastulli and other stories: Form and meaning in oral history. State University of New York Press.
Tucker, S. (2000). Swing shift: “All-girl” bands of the 1940s. Duke University Press.
Tucker, S. (2002). Big ears: Listening for gender in jazz studies. Current Musicology, 71-73 (Spring 2001-Spring 2002) pp. 375-376.
Tucker, S. (2002). When subjects don’t come out. Queer episodes in music and modern identity, 293-310.