A collection of poems and paintings paying tribute to the 1940's all-female jazz band. The International Sweethearts of Rhythm originated in a boarding school in Mississippi and eventually found their way to the most famous ballrooms in the country, offering solace during the hard years of the war. Includes chronology of the band's history.

The International Sweethearts of Rhythm, a popular women's jazz band of the 1940s, has earned a reputation as the 'best all-women's swing band ever to perform.' This revised and updated edition provides fascinating reading for jazz enthusiasts and students of American history, music, and women's history. It is the most comprehensive and objective history of the band to date. Handy documents all sides of the band's controversial story and interviews members of the band. She updates the careers of band members who remained in the music business. Accompanied by an extensive bibliography and many photographs.

Back in 1909, not far from Jackson, Mississippi, Dr. Laurence Clifton Jones opened a special place for orphans named Piney Woods Country Life School. Dr. Jones loved music and wanted the children to love it too. In 1939 he started a school band that was just for girls, and he called it the Sweethearts. The music the girls played was called swing. It had rhythms and melodies that got people up on their feet to dance. And like all good music, it told stories about how it feels to be alive. After the girls left Piney Woods, the band stayed together and performed around the world. With their enormous talent and joyful music, the Sweethearts chipped away at racist and sexist barriers wherever they went.

The story, based on extensive individual interviews, of the women’s swing bands that toured extensively during World War II and after -- a kind of “League of their Own” for jazz.

In jazz circles, players and listeners with “big ears” hear and engage complexity in the moment, as it unfolds. Taking gender as part of the intricate, unpredictable action in jazz culture, this interdisciplinary collection explores the terrain opened up by listening, with big ears, for gender in jazz. Essays range from a reflection on the female boogie-woogie pianists who played at Café Society in New York during the 1930s and 1940s to interpretations of how the jazzman is represented in Dorothy Baker’s novel Young Man with a Horn (1938) and Michael Curtiz’s film adaptation (1950). Taken together, the essays enrich the field of jazz studies by showing how gender dynamics have shaped the production, reception, and criticism of jazz culture. Scholars of music, ethnomusicology, American studies, literature, anthropology, and cultural studies approach the question of gender in jazz from multiple perspectives. One contributor scrutinizes the tendency of jazz historiography to treat singing as subordinate to the predominantly male domain of instrumental music, while another reflects on her doubly inappropriate position as a female trumpet player and a white jazz musician and scholar. Other essays explore the composer George Russell’s Lydian Chromatic Concept as a critique of mid-twentieth-century discourses of embodiment, madness, and black masculinity; performances of “female hysteria” by Les Diaboliques, a feminist improvising trio; and the BBC radio broadcasts of Ivy Benson and Her Ladies’ Dance Orchestra during the Second World War. By incorporating gender analysis into jazz studies, Big Ears transforms ideas of who counts as a subject of study and even of what counts as jazz. Contributors: Christina Baade, Jayna Brown, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Monica Hairston, Kristin McGee, Tracy McMullen, Ingrid Monson, Lara Pellegrinelli, Eric Porter, Nichole T. Rustin, Ursel Schlicht, Julie Dawn Smith, Jeffrey Taylor, Sherrie Tucker, João H. Costa Vargas

Looks at the all-girl dance bands and orchestras in Australia in the 1920s and 1930s. Working on the margins of a profession dominated by men, women musicians have long played together, turning novelty and sex-appeal to advantage. This book pays homage to the often forgotten women of these bands, and their influence on popular culture.

Women have been involved with jazz since its inception, but all too often their achievements were not as well known as those of their male counterparts. Some Liked It Hot looks at all-girl bands and jazz women from the 1920s through the 1950s and how they fit into the nascent mass culture, particularly film and television, to uncover some of the historical motivations for excluding women from the now firmly established jazz canon. This well-illustrated book chronicles who appeared where and when in over 80 performances, captured in both popular Hollywood productions and in relatively unknown films and television shows. As McGee shows, these performances reflected complex racial attitudes emerging in American culture during the first half of the twentieth century. Her analysis illuminates the heavily mediated representational strategies that jazz women adopted, highlighting the role that race played in constituting public performances of various styles of jazz from “swing” to “hot” and “sweet.” The International Sweethearts of Rhythm, Hazel Scott, the Ingenues, Peggy Lee, and Paul Whiteman are just a few of the performers covered in the book, which also includes a detailed filmography.