The Ladies Who Sing with the Band (review)

The Ladies Who Sing with the Band. By Betty Bennett. (Studies in Jazz, 36.) Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2000. [xvii, 141 p. ISBN 0-8108-3714-5. $35.]

"There are three sexes: men, women, and girl singers" (p. 91). It is likely that when Woody Herman made this remark, he was expressing the mystification bandleaders claimed was their shared reaction to the women who sang with them, but when Betty Bennett uses it, she blows wide open the whole question of how these women were perceived by the men who employed them. In fact, it is interesting that Bennett did not choose the quote as the title for her book, because beneath the story of her life, her narrative poses a series of questions about exactly why the female singer was seen and treated differently from the others by musicians, bandleaders, road managers, and audiences.

The singer was often perceived by the band members as perhaps less gifted, but more prominent, a situation that created resentment and difficulty; consequently, she often viewed herself from a negative perspective, conceding to the pressure to look, behave, and sing in a particular manner, often against her judgment of what repertory or technique suited her best. What Bennett conveys through her own story is that the girl singer had to be tough, independent, good-humored, and versatile --as well as beautiful and talented--in order to measure up to the expectations from within the industry, let alone those generated by audiences.

It becomes clear early in the book that the social conditions for girl singers were very exacting. Bennett engagingly relates how a new, often naive young female would have to learn to negotiate her way through the sexual minefield generated by her mere presence, as she traveled on a crowded tour bus for months at a time with a mixed-race party of raw young male instrumentalists and an older, wiser, and more experienced bandleader. With her frequent allusions to the casting-couch mentality, Bennett acknowledges how common such behavior was in the jazz world of the time, though she is clear about the potential dangers it posed to professional integrity. The discussion of her engagement with Benny Goodman's band in 1957 is revealing in this respect, and the anecdote about Goodman's nameless public introduction of Bennett as "the girl who sings with the band" reminds us of how insignificant the band's most public face could become at the whim of its leader (p. 103).

Bennett's story is an enjoyable, informative account of a fascinating period, when issues of race, gender, and culture crossed paths with some of the most important musical personalities of the century. Indeed, the range of engagements and professional contacts that constituted her career between 1941 and the mid-1960s creates a compelling scrapbook of jazz styles and personalities, yet it is in this respect that Bennett's account is perhaps most lacking. The list of artists she sang with or saw perform is phenomenal--Tommy Dorsey, Dizzy Gillespie, Stan Kenton, Charlie Ventura, Woody Herman, Count Basie--but there is disappointingly little description of how these musicians sounded. In the introduction, Bennett claims that she has used simple, familiar terminology, but it would not have required complex musical jargon to have given more of a flavor, for example, of what Gillespie sounded like playing in a small New York club in the early 1940s. Certainly she evokes the atmosphere of these experiences, and the personalities come across powerfully in many cases, but all of this is generally underbalanced by musical detail. Bennett's suggestion in the introduction that her "from-the-singer's-mouth" perspective is unique to her genre of performance invites anticipation of details about how she actually sang the music. Ultimately, however, one is led to understand far more about the role of the girl singer as a social construction than as a musical one.

Kate Daubney
Vienna

...