Not the Whole Story(ville): Early New Orleans Jazzwomen as New Jazz Studies

In terms of the “Jazz Tradition” narrative as analyzed by Scott DeVeaux (1991), jazz history has often been narrated as a linear parade of geniuses and styles timed by decade; in terms of race, gender, class, and sexuality, we could think of it as a respectability story, from brothels to Lincoln Center. Drawing from a two year research project on women in New Orleans Jazz conducted for the New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park (Tucker 2004), this paper reconfigures the root and routes of the “Jazz Tradition” narrative from single trajectory to a network of overlapping webs, including, but not limited to the brothels of Storyville. In considering the “immeasurably complex worlds through which women moved” and “which they helped to shape” in early New Orleans jazz (O’Meally, Edwards,Griffin, 2004, 2), this paper argues that if New Jazz Studies comprises a historiographical shift from “Constructing the Jazz Tradition” to “Deconstructing the Jazz Tradition” (Tucker 2005),  then to follow the women who participated in early jazz culture in New Orleans, is, by definition, to tell more complex stories that account for webs of power on fields of race, gender, class, sexuality, nation, and religion. With a focus on such artists and entrepreneurs as cornetist and madam Antonia Gonzales, pianist Mamie Desdunes (to whom Jelly Roll Morton credited as the source of the Creole approach to blues that he referred to as the Latin Tinge), lawn and garden party businesswomen such as Betsy Cole, and instrumentalists such as Emma Barrett and Dolly Adams, this paper argues that a focus on women in New Orleans jazz provides a powerful counter-narrative with profound implications for jazz historiography.