Not Yet a Woman, Never a Jazzman: Listening for Jazz in Midcentury Girl Cultures

Abstract

The middle decades of the twentieth century produced powerful—and contrasting—images of teenage girls as hyper-feminine, suburban consumers and jazz as authentic, masculine art music. These archetypes continue to shape scholarship today, making it difficult to imagine girls in the history of jazz. Yet there is plentiful documentary evidence that high school girls were highly involved with jazz at midcentury. In this article, I examine this evidence to argue for turning toward jazz audiences as a way of reorienting narratives of jazz history. First, I consider high school yearbooks and student newspapers, where girls are well-documented as jazz fans, players, and critics. I then turn to the widely circulated magazines Seventeen and Tan Confessions, both of which frequently included jazz coverage, to demonstrate that the jazz culture cultivated among girls in schools was also visible at a national scale. The sources show that most girls were amateurs who engaged with jazz at school and in female-focused media. Yet their experiences were, in many ways, more representative than those of professional jazz musicians. Most people involved with jazz at midcentury were amateur players, listeners, and critics, and this majority included thousands of girls. I argue that understanding ubiquity as a criterion for historical relevance in turn allows us to reshape our ideas of gender in jazz history.