This week’s reading assignment was all about the seemingly lost history of “all-girl” swing big bands of the 1940s. Swing Shift: “All-Girl” Bands of the 1940s by Sherrie Tucker focuses primarily on the war years on the American home front (and abroad in some cases) to discover—or, more aptly, remind us of—a significant and highly visible portion of women musicians playing swing jazz music. These women, most of them union members and wage earners, demonstrably “illuminat[ed] ways in which discourses of gender, race, nation, and labor intersect during World War II” and also help to identify how the Swing Era constitutes a constructed, narrative-driven periodization (Tucker, Swing Shift, 27). Notably through oral histories conducted with bandmembers of the International Sweethearts of Rhythm, Hours of Charm, The Darlings of Rhythm, and the Sharon Rogers All-Girl Band, Tucker elucidates how the highly skilled and professional all-girl bands of the 1940s were working, singing, traveling, trumpeting, drumming, and swinging during a period in which they are thought to have been only temporary, stop-gap replacements for men fighting overseas.
Swing Shift is a work largely made possible and effective by its extensive usage of oral history. In fact, I don’t believe such a work would have been possible without utilizing an oral history methodology. Tucker consistently references the postcolonial scholar Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak by forwarding the notion that the very presence of a narrative results in the simple fact that a person, group of people, or a point of view gets left behind and excluded from the larger story.
To quote Spivak directly, as Tucker does, from one of her seminal works titled The Post-Colonial Critic, “When a narrative is constructed, something is left out.” All-girl jazz bands of the 1940s were absolutely left out of the dominant narrative of the Swing Era and jazz history, constructed largely by historians and scholars who viewed these bands as either temporary “swing shift” Rosies or not even professional musicians at all. While Swing Shift is thoroughly researched, and Tucker is well-versed in the historiography (and musicology) of the Swing Era, such secondary sources alone could not and have not properly unearthed the all-girl bands from their burial beneath the mainstream big bands. While the emphasis on gender, race, and labor, as well as a dedicated feminist approach, certainly made this unearthing possible, I believe it is the oral histories that fully complete the new narrative. Tucker likely did not record all of her interviews and conversations, make an edited and revised transcript of each one, nor make any of them publicly available for further research, but it is abundantly clear that Swing Shift is as revealing and engaging as it is due to the personal insight of the all-girl musicians in question.
Perhaps the most important methodological statement one can find in Swing Shift is found in the aptly titled “Oral History” section of the Introduction: “If, however, we think of oral histories as events in themselves rather than as clear channels to the ‘true story,’ then we can begin to see how they relate to specific contexts” (Tucker, 26). Oral history as a methodology is not unheard of in jazz histories—in fact, a significant portion of such scholarship is conducted via oral history—as Tucker points out. Rather, and largely in line with Alessandro Portelli’s insistence on the orality of oral sources, Tucker breaks from prior jazz histories and treats oral history as not a eureka revelation towards the construction of a grand narrative but rather as individual elements of and contributions towards a larger, but not perhaps linear, picture. The very nature of interviewing the all-girl band musicians themselves, letting their words and their conceptions speak directly through and to Swing Shift, demonstrates the great capabilities of oral history in uncovering (or reminding) that which has been left out of the narrative. How fortuitous that these women were willing and able to discuss their experiences and lives, and how brilliant of Tucker to capitalize on such.
