Description
Book SynopsisThe Jazz Age coincided with the growth of Kansas City from frontier town to metropolitan city. Though Kansas City's music, culture, and stars are well covered,
Queering Kansas City Jazz supplements the grand narrative of jazz history by including queer identities in the city's history while framing the jazz-scene experience in terms of identity and space.
Trade Review"Clifford-Napoleon offers a taste of how much queerer Kansas City's jazz scene was than historian have previously recognized. She shows, too, how intertwined race and class were with gender experimentation. Her study invites readers to dig deeper into this nearly lost history of a jazz scene that historians thought they knew."—Robin C. Henry,
Middle West Reviews"This narrative rights the historical record and adds nuance to our understanding of the intersectionality of race, class, gender, and space in Jazz Age Kansas City."—Kathleen A. Kelly,
Kansas History"Clifford-Napoleone reframes the Kansas City jazz scene as one shaped by otherness, and she focuses on the non musical foundations of jazz. While that is one obvious strength of this slender volume, its greatest contribution entails the resurrection of the marginalized cultural pioneers of scene-making-the gender and sexual nonconformists, the working-class Kansas Citians, women, and the plethora of journeyman entertainers, all of whom nourished this scene. In that regard,
Queering Kansas City Jazz is an example of the opportunities that intersectionality provides for the reimagination of cultural phenomena."—Aaron Bachhoffer,
Journal of Southern History“
Queering Kansas City Jazz offers a new and exciting perspective on the jazz scene that accompanied the growth of Kansas City from frontier town to metropolitan city during the early twentieth century. It will potentially change the way in which we understand regional identity and recognize those who were pushed into the margins of our social histories.”—Tammy Kernodle, professor of musicology at Miami University and author of
Soul on Soul: The Life and Music of Mary Lou WilliamsTable of ContentsList of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
1. Rethinking Kansas City’s Jazz Story
2. Kansas City’s Jazz Scene
3. The Myth of the Wide-Open Town
4. Sissy Nights at the Spinning Wheel
5. Crib Girls to Criminals
6. Queering Dante’s Inferno
7. Remembering KC
Notes
Bibliography
Index
