Some Liked It Hot: The Jazz Canon and the All-Girl Bands in Times of War and Peace, CA. 1928-1955

This dissertation focuses on a unique moment in American music history, when women were permitted—and encouraged—to enter into and perform popular music in heretofore male-dominated public spaces and professional domains. During these transitional decades, the 1930s and 1940s, a public debate of race, gender and popular music began to emerge, unleashing a discourse that ultimately disrupted the all too narrowly conceived jazz cannon. By tracing popular debates concerning women, race and jazz, I uncover those forces contributing to women's eventual exclusion from the jazz cannon. The dissertation employs a comparative approach to elucidate the historical impact of race upon musical performance and representation of and by women in jazz. This approach allows me to explore and contrast the public musical practices of black and racially mixed “all-girl” bands, such as the International Sweethearts of Rhythm, with those of the more visible white female ensembles, such as Ina Ray Hutton and Her Melodears.

Throughout the dissertation, I draw heavily from the disciplines of ethnomusicology, gender studies and cultural studies by examining how women constructed alternative identities as jazz musicians, in contrast to prevailing gendered representations. Recent inquiries in cultural studies inform this project's examination of how emerging perceptions of women and sexuality codified a distinctly American hetero-normativity. The successful construction of a pseudo-scientific and portable sexuality through the wide-scale distribution of pin-ups influenced the public reception of all-girl jazz. By illuminating residual associations of black music to transgressive racial desires, I compare how perceived racial or social differences variously influenced the presentation and performance practice of women of color with those of white women musicians. Particularly, I illuminate those mass mediated representations that eventually inhibited women in the work force from securing more prominent roles in American public spheres immediately after the war, especially considering the unprecedented boundary breaking initiated by these female musicians.

The seven chapters of the dissertation explore historical precedents for the success of all-girl bands, especially during two decades of socioeconomic difficulties, and of the pressure placed on male jazz musicians by World War II and the postwar years. Other prominent discussions investigate topics such as the relative influence of popular theatrical forms from Vaudeville to Variety Reviews upon the earliest all-girl performances, the mediated representations of all-girl bands in recordings, film, print, and radio, and the conflation of race and music as they are played out in public spaces. Finally, the musical sounds themselves are prioritized with a comparison of all-girl band repertoires, improvised soloing vocabularies and “sweet” and “swing” performance styles. Invaluable considerations for such an analysis are the various constructions of musical femininity put forth by the media and the producers of all-girl bands, the process of integration (especially in the south), the concomitant coping mechanisms induced by mixed all-girl bands on tour and finally the nationalist or anationalist agendas of international touring groups.