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Transpacific Correspondence pp 75–91Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

You’re My Pin-up Girl!: The Politics of Jazz Fandom and the Making of Mary Lou Williams in the 1940s

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Abstract

Yamada delves into the relationship between African American woman jazz pianist Mary Lou Williams and her fans in the mid-1940s. While acknowledging fans’ engagement in promoting the pianist as a sign of rising consumerism in the postwar period, his study suggests that the crux of fan activities lies in an attempt to imagine and form a novel way of sociality at a time when the United States was undergoing reconfigurations of race and gender relations. Making use of fan mail and a fan magazine, the chapter also discusses Williams’s struggle with the dual expectations of artistry and glamour and argues that highlighting the voices of fans presents a more complicated view of an African American artist and the sociocultural context that surrounded her.

If you shut your eyes you would bet she was a man. But last week’s audiences at Manhattan’s Downtown Café Society had their eyes open.

Unknown, “No Kitten on the Keys,” Time (July 26, 1943, p. 76)

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Marian McPartland, “Mary Lou: Marian McPartland Salutes One Pianist Who Remains Modern and Communicative,” Down Beat 24, no. 2 (October 17, 1957), 12.

  2. 2.

    This chapter relies on hundreds of hand-written and typed letters sent to Williams during the 1940s as a primary source. For the purpose of not losing the tone and nuances expressed in the original mail, I neither corrected the typos or grammatical errors in the fan mail nor used “sic” to mark them. Unless otherwise noted, race, gender, and age of the letter writer is taken from the U.S. federal census records for 1930 and 1940 through Ancestry.com.

  3. 3.

    For the discourse that jazz is a people music, see Sidney Finkelstein, Jazz: A People’s Music (1948; repr., New York: International Publishers, 1988), LeRoi Jones, Blues People: Negro Music in White America (1963; repr., New York: Perennial, 2002), and Eric Hobsbawm, Uncommon People: Resistance, Rebellion, and Jazz (New York: The New Press, 1998). Scott DeVeaux made a demographic analysis of the contemporary jazz audience. Guthrie P. Ramsey utilized his family narrative to delineate the perception of Black music among African Americans. Ken Prouty discusses the online jazz community. Scott DeVeaux, Jazz in America: Who’s Listening (Carson: Seven Locks Press, 1995); Guthrie P. Ramsey, Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); and Ken Prouty, Knowing Jazz: Community, Pedagogy, and Canon in the Information Age (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2011).

  4. 4.

    Daniel Cavicchi, Tramps Like Us: Music and Meaning among Springsteen Fans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 8.

  5. 5.

    Thomas H. Greenland, Jazzing: New York City’s Unseen Scene (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016).

  6. 6.

    For more on the venue Café Society and its politics, see David W. Stowe, “The Politics of Café Society,” The Journal of American History 84, no.3 (March 1998): 1384–1406. For the life and work of Williams, see Linda Dahl, Morning Glory: A Biography of Mary Lou Williams (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Tammy L. Kernodle, Soul on Soul: The Life and Music of Mary Lou Williams (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2004). For the artistic and political contexts of Harlem in the 1940s and their influence on African American women artists including Williams, see Farah Jasmine Griffin, Harlem Nocturne: Women Artists and Progressive Politics during World War II (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2013).

  7. 7.

    Mary Lou Williams Fan Club Newsletter, n.d., Mary Lou Williams Collection, Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University (hereafter Williams Collection).

  8. 8.

    Here I would like to refute the oft-heard notion that the rise of social media in the digital era allows fans themselves to create their own organizations as opposed to the industry-led fan clubs. From the beginning, fan clubs were created and managed by fans themselves. It is more accurate to say that many of their activities have become visible in the digital era.

  9. 9.

    Samantha Barbas, Movie Crazy: Fans, Stars, and the Cult of Celebrity (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 109–134; Band Leaders, July 1945, 52; September 1945, 52.

  10. 10.

    Band Leaders, May 1945, 62.

  11. 11.

    Mary Lou Williams Fan Club membership card, n.d., Williams Collection.

  12. 12.

    Tommy Hand to the Mary Lou Williams Fan Club, June 6, 1946, Williams Collection.

  13. 13.

    Newsletter, n.d., Williams Collection.

  14. 14.

    Newsletter, June 3, 1947, Williams Collection.

  15. 15.

    Arzelia Taylor to the Fan Club, April 20, 1946, Williams Collection.

  16. 16.

    Arzelia Taylor to the Fan Club, April 20, 1946, Williams Collection.

  17. 17.

    Barbas, Movie Crazy, 109–134; Diane Pecknold, The Selling Sound: The Rise of the Country Music Industry (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 95–132; Elena Razlogova, The Listener’s Voice: Early Radio and the American Public (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 115–151.

  18. 18.

    Donna Louise Taylor to Williams, May 19 and November 11, 1946; Tommy Hand to Williams, June 3, 1946, Williams Collection.

  19. 19.

    Willie Harper to Williams, June 3, Williams Collection.

  20. 20.

    H. W. Schwerin to Williams, June 10, 1946, Williams Collection.

  21. 21.

    Razlogova, The Listener’s Voice, 115–151; Unknown to Williams, July 23, 1952, Williams Collection.

  22. 22.

    Mary Lou Williams, “Billy … Rowe’s Note Book,” Pittsburgh Courier, September 14, 1946, emphasis added.

  23. 23.

    George Lipsitz, “In the Sweet Buy and Buy: Consumer Culture and American Studies,” in American Studies in a Moment of Danger (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 260, emphasis in original.

  24. 24.

    Arzelia Taylor to the Fan Club, April 20, 1946, Williams Collection.

  25. 25.

    Donna Louise Taylor to the Fan Club, May 19, 1946, Williams Collection.

  26. 26.

    Terry Bandey to Williams, March 4, 1946, Williams Collection.

  27. 27.

    Warren Joe Spruell, September 16, 1946, Williams Collection.

  28. 28.

    Blanche Harrison to the Fan Club, January 23, 1947, Williams Collection.

  29. 29.

    Newsletter, June 3, 1947, Williams Collection.

  30. 30.

    Jimmy Mintz to Mary Lou Williams, February 17, 1946, Williams Collection.

  31. 31.

    Taylor to the Fan Club, November 11, 1946, Williams Collection.

  32. 32.

    Taylor to the Fan Club, November 11, 1946, Williams Collection.

  33. 33.

    Alter Lee Ford to Williams, April 26, 1946, Williams Collection.

  34. 34.

    Warren Joe Spruell to Williams, September 16, 1946, Williams Collection.

  35. 35.

    Sam Dial to Williams, January 1, 1947, Williams Collection.

  36. 36.

    Tommy Hand to the Fan Club, June 3, 1946; John A. Clark to Williams, April 2, 1947, Williams Collection.

  37. 37.

    Izzy Rowe, “Mary Lou Williams, Ace Woman Pianist,” Pittsburgh Courier, August 1945, 21.

  38. 38.

    Sherrie Tucker, Swing Shift: All-Girl Bands of the 1940s (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 68.

  39. 39.

    Florine Robinson, “That Key Gal,” Band Leaders, January 1946, 28–29.

  40. 40.

    Robinson, “That Key Gal,” 28–29.

  41. 41.

    Robinson, “That Key Gal,” 28–29.

  42. 42.

    “Fan Stand,” Band Leaders, May 1945, 62.

  43. 43.

    Band Leaders, March 1945, 64.

  44. 44.

    Band Leaders, November 1945, 54.

  45. 45.

    Lucille Barlow to Williams, January 23, 1946, Williams Collection.

  46. 46.

    Florence Cuevas to Williams, n.d., Williams Collection.

  47. 47.

    Gayle Murchison, “Mary Lou Williams’s Girl Stars and the Politics of Negotiation: Jazz, Gender, and Jim Crow,” in Women’s Bands in America: Performing Music and Gender, ed. Jill M. Sullivan (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2016), 169–228.

  48. 48.

    Barbas, Movie Crazy, 6.

  49. 49.

    Dahl, Morning Glory, 155; Carol Bash, Mary Lou Williams: The Lady Who Swings the Band, The Mary Lou Williams Project, 2015.

  50. 50.

    McPartland, “Mary Lou,” Down Beat 24, no. 2 (October 17, 1957), 12.

  51. 51.

    Nicole T. Rustin, “‘Mary Lou Williams Plays Like a Man!’: Gender, Genius, and Difference in Black Music Discourse,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 104, no.3 (Summer 2005): 445–462.

Acknowledgment

The author wishes to thank the following colleagues and mentors for comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this chapter: Bernard James Remollino, Michael Dean, Amanda Martinez, Moustafa Bayoumi, Robin D. G. Kelley, Shana L. Redmond, and George Lipsitz.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of History, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Masayoshi Yamada

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  1. Masayoshi Yamada
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Correspondence to Masayoshi Yamada .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of African American & African Studies, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, Minneapolis, MN, USA

    Yuichiro Onishi

  2. College of Letters, Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto, Japan

    Fumiko Sakashita

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Yamada, M. (2019). You’re My Pin-up Girl!: The Politics of Jazz Fandom and the Making of Mary Lou Williams in the 1940s. In: Onishi, Y., Sakashita, F. (eds) Transpacific Correspondence. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05457-1_4

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