2027 Ann Thomas Memorial Lecture Series: Black Girls, Black Women, and the Contested Meaning of Jazz

February 16, 2027
12:00pm - 1:00pm

The 2027 Ann Thomas Memorial Lecture Series Presents:

Black Girls, Black Women, and the Contested Meanings of Jazz, featuring Dr. Elea Proctor

Abstract: Although Black women have been foundational to the creation and evolution of jazz since its origins, they were long excluded from its official histories. Black women jazz performers were often criticized along racialized, gendered, and sexualized lines in ways that called their authenticity and talent into question. “She didn’t play ‘jazz,’ she wasn’t talented enough, she didn’t swing, too commercial, gimmicky”—such arguments, as Monica Hairston notes, were made about pianist Hazel Scott and could apply to a number of Black women performers in the first half of the twentieth century (Hairston 2008, 65).

In this talk, Dr. Proctor untangles debates about Black women, jazz, and authenticity through the reception of three Black female jazz vocalists: child singer “Baby” Esther Lee Jones (c. 1918–?), Harlem’s sweetheart Florence Mills (1896–1927), and expatriate Josephine Baker (1906–1975). Each sang jazz repertoire alongside other forms of popular music while navigating prevailing stereotypes of Black girls and women in the 1920s and ’30s. This talk demonstrates how these performers challenged the boundaries of musical genre and the meaning of jazz itself, both in the United States and abroad.

Speaker Bio: Dr. Elea Proctor is an assistant professor at The Ohio State University, where she teaches in the Department of African American and African Studies and holds an affiliation with the University’s School of Music. Dr. Proctor earned her B.A. in Music from Florida State University and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Musicology from Stanford University. Her areas of expertise include nineteenth- and twentieth-century African American music, identity and performance, and the gendered history of slavery in the United States. She is working on a book, provisionally titled Jump Jane Crow: Black Women and the Blackface Minstrelsy Tradition, that examines how Black women shaped blackface minstrelsy and its afterlives from the 1830s through the 1930s.