From Juke Joints to Jazz Jams: The Political Economy of Female Club Owners
Keywords:
jazz venues, juke joints, women, gender, workAbstract
The history of jazz and blues is tied up with the spaces owned and curated by female proprietors. Early jazz making was supported by enterprising women who would host lawn parties at their residences in New Orleans. The blues developed in places known as juke joints, which were and are still often women-owned spaces in the southern United States. Nevertheless, while histories of jazz and blues tend to focus on the musicians and composers of the respective genres, the venues have largely gone unstudied. If venues have been discussed, they are primarily the larger spaces owned by men. The work of club owners is unique, as they also act as club managers and are frequently curators of the music being presented. Club ownership as an occupational category is largely marked as male, with the places and spaces of musical production often seen as being hostile to women. This paper seeks to examine the work of female club owners and reveal the hidden political economy of places and spaces of jazz and blues.References
Atkins, E., 2003. Toward a Global History of Jazz. In E. Atkins Ed. Jazz Planet. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press: xi–xxvii.
Baldwin, D., 2014. Making Do: Beauty, Enterprise, and the “Makeover” of Race Womanhood. In Chicago’s New Negroes: Modernity, the Great Migration, and Black Urban Life. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, pp. 53 – 90.
Becker, H., 2004. Jazz Places. In A. Bennett and R. Peterson Eds. Music Scenes: Local, Translocal, and Virtual. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press: 17–28.
Berliner, P., 1994. Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Bricktop, and Haskins, J., 1983. Bricktop. New York: Welcome Rain Publishers.
Collins, P., 2000. Gender, Black Feminism, and Black Political Economy. The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 568 (1): 41–53.
Collier, J., 1979. The Making of Jazz. New York: Dell.
Davis, A., 1981. Women, race & class. New York: Random.
Erenberg, L., 1984. Steppin’ Out: New York Nightlife and the Transformation of American Culture, 1890-1930. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Gebhardt, N. –
When Jazz Was Foreign: Rethinking Jazz History. Jazzforschung, 44: 185–197.
Popular Musicians and Mass Entertainment in American Culture, 1870–1929. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Grace, K., 2003. “Juke Joints”. In Alcohol and Temperance in Modern History: An International Encyclopedia, Vol. 1, ABC-CLIO: 343.
Grazian, D., 2003. Blue Chicago: The Search for Authenticity in Urban Blues Clubs. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Greenland, T., 2016. Jazzing: New York City’s Unseen Scene. Champaign: University of Illinois Press.
Jackson, G., 2015. “Rosy, Possum, Morning Star: African American Women’s Work and Play Songs”: An Excerpt from Put Your Hands on Your Hips and Act Like a Woman: Song, Dance, Black History, and Poetics in Performance. Journal of Black Studies, 46 (8): 773–796.
Jackson, T., 2012. Blowin’ the Blues Away: Performance and Meaning on the New York Jazz Scene. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Johnson, G. –
‘Sobre Las Olas’: A Mexican Genesis in Borderlands Jazz and the Legacy for Ethnic Studies.
Comparative American Studies, 6(3): 225–237.
Spaces of Conflict, Sounds of Solidarity: Music, Race, and Spatial Entitlement in Los Angeles. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Jones, J., 1985. Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present. New York: Basic Books.
Josephson, B. and T. Trilling-Josephson, 2009. Café Society: The wrong place for the Right people. Champaign: University of Illinois Press.
Kronenburg, R., 2012. Live Architecture: Venues, Stages, and Arenas for Popular Music. New York: Routledge.
Library of Congress. n.d. Traditional Work Songs. https://www.loc.gov/collections/songs-of-america/articles-and-essays/musical-styles/traditional-and-ethnic/traditional-work-songs/ Accessed: 23 May 2018.
Lomax, A., 1993. The Land Where the Blues Began. New York: Pantheon Books.
Lomax, J. and Lomax, A., 2000. Our Singing Country: Folk Songs and Ballads. Mineola: Dover Publications.
Miller, K., 2008. Working musicians: exploring the rhetorical ties between musical labour and leisure. Leisure Studies, 27 (4): 427–441.
Nardone, J., 2003. Roomful of Blues: Jukejoints and the Cultural Landscape of the Mississippi Delta. Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture, 9: 166–175.
Nunn, E., 2015. Sounding the Color Line: Music and Race in the Southern Imagination. Athens: University of Georgia Press.
Pearson, B., 2003. Jook Women. Arkansas Review: A Journal of Delta Studies, 34 (1): 18–29.
Pelligrinelli, L., 2008. Separated at "Birth": Singing and the History of Jazz. In N. Rustin and S. Tucker Eds. Big Ears: Listening for Gender in Jazz Studies. Durham: Duke University Press: 31-47.
Pelote, V., 2000. Jazz Venues. In B. Kircher Ed. The Oxford Companion to Jazz. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 722–733.
Peterson, V., 2005. How (the Meaning of) Gender Matters in Political Economy. New Political Economy, 10 (4): 499–521.
Ramey, D., 2014. Slave Women. New Georgia Encyclopedia.
http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/history-archaeology/slave-women Accessed: 27 January 2018.
Ryan, J., 2011. Beale Street Blues?: Tourism, Musical Labor, and the Fetishization of Poverty in Blues Discourse. Ethnomusicology, 55 (3): 473–503
Sanchez, T., 2000. The Feminine Side of Bootlegging. Louisiana History, 41(4): 403–433.
Schuller, G., 1968. Early Jazz: Its Roots and Musical Development. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Shank, B., 1994. Dissonant Identities: The Rock’n’Roll Scene in Austin, Texas. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press.
Straw, W., 1991. Systems of Articulation, Logics of Change: Communities and Scenes in Popular Music. Cultural Studies, 5 (3): 368–88.
Stump, R., 1998. Place and Innovation in Popular Music: The Bebop Revolution in Jazz. Journal of Cultural Geography, 18 (1): 11–34.
Sublette, N., 2004. Cuba and Its Music: From First Drums to the Mambo. Chicago: Chicago Review Press.
Szwed, J., 2000. Jazz 101: A Complete Guide to Learning and Loving Jazz. New York: Hyperion.
Tucker, S., 2004. A Feminist Perspective on New Orleans Jazzwomen: A NOJNHP Research Study. New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park.
Wagner, B., 2009. Disturbing the Peace: Black Culture and the Police Power after Slavery. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Wallace, Rob., 2009. Improvisation and Literature: a brief guide. http://www.improvcommunity.ca/sites/improvcommunity.ca/files/research_collection/41/Improvisation_and_Literature.pdf Accessed 2 June 2018.
Wesley, C., 1927. Negro Labor in the United States, 1850–1925: A Study in American Economic History. New York: Vanguard Press.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Authors retain copyright, while licensing their work under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
