As a Brit, when I think of US national parks I think Yosemite—thousands of miles of lakes, trees, bears, and continent-threatening supervolcanoes. (Keep an eye on that one, America; it’s going to be huge in the next few million years!) What I don’t think of is a three-mile square of urban New Orleans. And yet, New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park is a little piece of NOLA managed by the same National Parks Service that keeps watch over your natural disasters-in-waiting and man-eating carnivores.
There’s a good chance you knew this already. But did you know the NPS also commissions research on great historical ladies of blues and jazz? This is the topic of a fascinating 372-page paper called A Feminist Perspective on New Orleans Jazzwomen, produced by Sherrie Tucker, et al, back in 2004. It sheds some much-needed light on the often-overlooked ladies integral to America’s musical heritage. “While we do see traces of women’s participation in extant…jazz histories,” Tucker wrote, “we seldom see women presented as central to jazz culture. Therefore, they tend to appear to occupy minor or supporting roles, if they appear at all.”
The paper goes a way to setting that right, by documenting the pioneering roles taken by lesser-known women like Lil Hardin and Blanche Calloway. Occupying a good chunk of combined space are the incredible Goodson sisters: Dalla (or Del
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