Forerunners of Women in Rock

Lost stars of the Big Band Era

As part of my research into the antecedents to women in rock, I began digging into the history of women in popular music before rock took shape.  I was floored by what I found, and have become a fan of a whole bunch of artists I had never known existed. Stick with me!  This is wonderful and fascinating and sometimes frustrating stuff.

Before girls didn’t play the guitar, girls also didn't play the trumpet and they didn’t play drums.  At least, that's probably what most of us grew up thinking.  For several decades, there would have been little reason to know otherwise, since the history of women in American popular music was largely buried.  The cynic could easily believe that women didn't even try, but in fact there is a rich history of women performing at the highest level and even leading successful musical bands comprising both men and women.  It just required that some curious souls do some digging, to uncover that history.  I’m sure there is more to come.

Girl-bands didn’t start with blues or rock.  The Big Band era featured a lot of great women-led and all-female jazz and swing bands.  Yes, they encountered deeply rooted sexism, though it was different than today’s politicized sexism—it was just in the water.  Women, after all, had only recently won the right to vote, and it was still within living memory that they could not own property in their own name.  But women who wanted to play music could do so, if they persevered.  The best of them became both popular and, importantly, well-regarded by top male musicians and promoters (the press was a different matter).  Louis Armstrong remarked of Valaida Snow that she was the second best jazz trumpeter in the world—after himself, of course! 

The big window of opportunity for some of these bands was in the early 1940’s, when the men were off fighting the war, and the ladies stepped up.  The existing footage of some of their performances is as good as that of many of their better-known male counterparts.  Some of these groups toured widely and played major venues.  And then, it all faded away.  The men came home, and like Rosie the Riveter, a lot of the great female musicians found themselves out of a job.

The most disturbing thing, however, is how easily and nearly completely women were erased from the history of those times.  One reason this happened was that, even in their heyday, these musicians were treated differently from the men. They were not offered recording contracts as readily as male artists, and were not offered positions leading the house bands at major venues, even when they were wildly popular on tour.  This means that they left behind less material to mine. 

The second reason they were rendered invisible is that most of the writing about music was being done by men, whether it was newspaper columnists writing contemporaneous reviews, or authors of book-length histories of the era.  Most of these writers seem to have reflexively discounted women musicians.  The only known mention of Ina Ray Hutton by the New York Times is a brief, insulting obituary, despite the fact that she had once led bands composed of some of the best male musicians of the time.  According to the Times’ own research, Valaida Snow was only mentioned once in their pages until their belated obituary, published in 2020(!)

It was feminist historians in the 1960’s who began the process of digging into the archives and celebrating the women of a previous generation.  Modern music historians have continued to dig, and have found some wonderful old recordings and footage, including the clips below.

All of this is to say, history keep repeating itself, and women have constantly had to push to be acknowledged in the music world—this is as true in classical music as in jazz or rock.  Today’s biggest pop stars are now women, so perhaps the cycle is being broken, at least in pop music and in genres traditionally regarded as “women’s” music.  However, in rock, jazz and classical, it is still an uphill fight for women. 

Ina Ray Hutton

From 1931 through 1939, Hutton led an all-female jazz band called “the Melodears”.  Like most female ensembles of the time, the band’s name was a play on their gender.  They toured actively through the 1930s, and appeared on some of the earliest commercial television broadcasts.  Hutton eventually tired of being treated by the media as a novelty act, and disbanded the Melodears. She formed a new band with male musicians, and went on to another decade of success touring, recording and making television and movie appearances. 

Here is “Melodears Swing” (1936):

Hutton had a sister who was a successful vocalist, duetting with Sinatra among other highlights.  The most ironic aspect to their story is that throughout their careers, they passed as white, despite being mixed race (listed in official records as “mulatto”).  Had their background been more widely known, laws against integrated performing groups would have blocked them from doing most of the things they did. 

Hutton’s existing recordings have been collected and released on CD.  As is often the case with legacy American musical acts, the best written appreciation of her appeared not in the U.S. press but in the British paper The Guardian:

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2011/jul/07/ina-ray-hutton-melodears-jazz

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Valaida Snow

Snow was a star from the age of five, played a dozen instruments, had a fabulous voice, and lived large.  She was often compared with Louis Armstrong (not least by Satchmo himself). She achieved her greatest successes recording and touring in Europe, where there were no explicit color lines and where a female instrumentalist was more fully accepted and welcomed. (According to the Times obituary, she never recorded as a trumpet player in the U.S., despite the respect in which she was held by other musicians.)

Here is the Times obituary from 2020:  https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/22/obituaries/valaida-snow-overlooked-black-history-month.html

“My Heart Belongs to Daddy” (Cole Porter; 1939)

Snow turns in a spectacular vocal performance and then knocks it out with a trumpet solo.

“Patience and Fortitude” (Warren/Moore; 1946)

This has it all: the singing, the trumpet solo, the stage presence, the fun.