Black Women Working Together: Jazz, Gender, and the Politics of Validation

In the essay "Black Women and Music: A Historical Legacy of Struggle" (2001), Angela Davis chronicles the cultural and historic trajectory black women musicians have advanced through music in their transition from free people to enslaved persons to free but oppressed people in relation to the context of their lives in Africa and America. While Davis situates her discussion in how black women have used spirituals and the blues as a means of developing social and political consciousness, her theoretical scope could easily be enlarged to include other forms of black music, most notably jazz. One of the arguments Davis raises concerns the common reading of black women’s relationships with each other in the larger scope of popular culture. These relationships are often framed as competitive and antagonistic. Rarely has the complex and layered engagement between black women been acknowledged. In recent years, popular culture has perpetuated the trope of competitiveness, hostility, and violence between black women through social networks (e.g., Facebook, Twitter) and reality television (e.g., "Basketball Wives," "Real Housewives of Atlanta"). These depictions have been used to stereotype black women, discredit their viability in certain social environments, and reject them as intellectual beings. But close examination of the social and familial relationships between women exposes a complex culture of engagement and socialization. These relationships are at times defined by layered and multifarious praxes through which collectives of black women have engaged in self-definition; created systems of knowledge that provided the skills to navigate political, social, and economic spheres; and formed "safe spaces" that have supported their process of brokering power.

Why has this competitive narrative permeated popular culture and our readings of how black women engage with one another? One reason is that this narrative has been defined by emotional responses generated from the engagement between black men and women in public and private spheres. The supposed lack of "good" black men who can sustain "good" relationships with "good" black women serves as the undercurrent for competitive and sometimes toxic relationships between black women. This is furthered with the proliferation of the mythology of the "strong black woman" and her engagement with "weak black men" and the supposed subversion of social and power structures that define masculinity. These ideological beliefs raise a number of questions when considered in relation to the interactions between black women and men in larger contexts of popular culture. How has the competitive narrative framed how black women musicians are read and defined within popular culture history and criticism? To understand this we must interrogate how the narrative of competition and the engagement of black women musicians have been documented in the historiography of jazz.

The narrative of the competitive personality or the inability to "get along" among black women musicians has become paramount to the mythologies that have shaped the public understandings of the culture of jazz.¹ It is often used as one of the rationales for why women are "disruptive" to the work being done in spaces where jazz is created. The prevailing thought is that the competitiveness that women exhibit in these spaces is one that is destructive rather than productive to the working environment. The male competitive spirit in jazz, however, is the essence of the creative energy generated. It is "the" necessary constant, for it produces cultural hallmarks, real-time moments of genius and frames the infinite nature of possibility that occurs when men work together even when poised or posed in competitive stances. When this type of analysis is extended to women musicians, it is often subverted from its role as the tool of empowerment that helps one develop her individual musical voice to one where she is forced into battle to be the "one" female creative voice that survives and earns a place in the historical narrative. The result, as evidenced in the written, recorded, and cinematic histories of jazz, is what several scholars have described as the phenomenon of the "exceptional woman" (Tucker 2001/2002, Rustin 2005). The exceptional woman becomes the rationale for the exclusion of other women and...