Conference Agenda

To be a woman in jazz is to, at some point, have been asked to solve the “problem” of women in jazz. This is neither surprising nor new; minoritized populations are frequently recognized as problem solvers in their oppressions. But as Sherrie Tucker has explained, if it were simply a matter of “lost women,” the gender imbalance in the jazz canon would have been addressed by the 1980s through the work of Dahl, Placksin, Handy, and others (Tucker 2004). Though the question of what to do about women in jazz has been explored, critiqued, and debated by critics, musicians, and historians across the century (including by scholars like Davis, Tucker, Rustin, Pellegrinelli, McMullen, and others), the problem persists, refusing to lose its urgency and relevance while simultaneously refusing a solution. Gender remains separated from the core of jazz history.

In order to bind jazz’s existing gender studies more tightly to jazz studies writ large, I propose to re-center jazz histories on what I call jazz patriarchy: the social and political system that has organized jazz histories, values, and relationships around men and male domination over women and non-binary musicians, agents, partners, leaders, and others. I introduce this framework through a case study focused on esperanza spalding’s versions of the 1960s popular-song-turned-jazz-standard “Girl Talk.” The song, written by Neal Hefti and Bobby Troup for the film Harlow (1965), features lyrics that are emblematic of half a century of patriarchy in the United States, and its rapid evolution into a jazz standard bears the hallmarks of a particularly jazz patriarchy. I analyze spalding’s 2023 performances from Alive at the Village Vanguard, the North Sea Jazz Festival, and The Cabaret. In each, Spalding builds on and extends past recordings (i.e. Julie London, Tony Bennett, Ella Fitzgerald, Betty Carter, and Dakota Staton), remediating historic power imbalances through improvisation and signification. Rewriting over a half century of jazz patriarchal approaches to canon, lineage, language, musical structure, values, and institutions, spalding blithely ignores what Audre Lorde calls "the gap of male ignorance," refusing to stymie herself with either the master's tools or his prerequisites for change (Lorde 1984).

The fascination with the cultural trope of the witch in mid-century Anglo-America can be attributed to a variety of socio-cultural factors, primarily the rise of the sixties counterculture and the second wave feminist movement. At a time when women sought out new modes of political and spiritual empowerment, popular interest in Wiccan spell work and how-to books proliferated across the Global North; influential Wiccan incantation records promised young women upward social mobility through magical practice. Building on feminist psychoanalyst Justyna Sempuch’s recent work, Fantasies of Gender and the Witch (Purdue UP, 2008), which explores the emergence of cultural representations of the witch in radical feminist literature of the Wiccan influx, my study delves into the examination of how the witch trope functions within the realm of feminist music-making during the same era.

Within popular music cultures of the long sixties, primarily the folk revivalist movement and the rock ’n’ roll counterculture, key female vocalists frequently conjured what might be termed, “herstorical fantasies” of the witch. Stevie Nicks’ composition with Fleetwood Mac, “Rhiannon” (1976) might well be considered as an anthemic work of this trend -- framed by Nicks’ iconic, spoken preamble, “this is a song about an Old Welsh witch.” As popular music scholar, Sheila Whiteley has observed in Repressive Representations (2000), the rock ’n’ roll counterculture was an androcentric and overtly misogynist space that left little room for women artists’ agential self-expression. In response, Nicks’ raspy declaration offers up a powerful protest against this patriarchal cultural frame. Drawing upon findings from my research included in the forthcoming Witch Studies Reader (Duke UP, 2024), this presentation will offer a close analysis of Nicks’ “Rhiannon,” attending to Nicks’ subversive vocality, and also the contrasting interplay between the voices of Nicks and co-vocalist Christine McVie that come together to produce layered harmonies of a powerful Wiccan incantation — evoking a wind-swept psychedelic journey into the dream of an archaic Goddess.