Ginger Smock: Narratives of Perpetual Discovery, Jazz Historiography, and the “Swinging Lady of the Violin”

Abstract Ginger Smock (1920–95), an African American jazz and classical violinist, was a popular Los Angeles entertainer and one of the first African American women bandleaders on television. This article traces her career from Los Angeles’ Central Avenue to Las Vegas showroom orchestras, drawing on archival materials from the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. Through a close reading of a 1951 DownBeat profile of Smock, I interrogate racialized constructions of gender in that magazine and frame mid-century jazz reporting on women instrumentalists via a “narrative of perpetual discovery” that positions these women as waiting for a career break that never comes. As an antidote to the effacement implicit in such narratives, I propose close documentation of sustained artistic practice: That is, the day-to-day facts of a working musician's life. This article reads Smock's professional trajectory through an intersectional lens to offer a critical perspective on the ways in which social identities, especially race and gender, may shape both musical careers and our historicization of those careers.

succeeded-as measured via gigs and reputation-as a working musician for a half-century but who retrospectively saw herself as a failure? Furthermore, reworking a question that Lisa Barg has posed with regard to Billy Strayhorn, what new histories of musical, social, and cultural life in jazz and classical music does Smock's story afford, and what sonic histories of Otherness might be recorded in her musical output? 14 Through an in-depth survey of Smock's professional life, I offer a critical perspective on the ways in which social identities may shape both musical careers and our historicization of those careers.
Building Out the Archive Archives are "where law and singularity intersect in privilege," writes Jacques Derrida. 15 The reminder by Joan M. Schwartz and Terry Cook that archives are "dynamic technologies of rule" that "create the histories and social realities they ostensibly only describe" carries particular meaning in a story such as Smock's, whose absence from jazz violin histories is linked to her lack of recordings-the sine qua non of jazz historiography-which is in turn linked to the "social realities" within which she lived and worked. 16 The contents of public archives delimit the narratives that may be told about the associated body politic, meaning that building out those archives is one means of claiming space to script the future. 17 Nevertheless building out an archive does not eliminate its limitations. In certain corners of the jazz archive Ginger Smock is an object of perpetual discovery while in others she is simply absent. To dismiss this-even in the name of expanding that archive-is to deny its impact on her career and her own retrospective reading thereof, while to foreground it would generate a new narrative of discovery. This article seeks a middle ground that "inhabits [the] limitations" of the archive while refusing to center exclusion or absence. 18 From 2013 to 2018, I worked with two families to coordinate the transfer of their private collections of Smock-related  and various personal and professional effects, including her violin and music stand. Items donated by Dean and Ivy Reeves, the son and wife, respectively, of Canadian jazz violin collector John Reeves, include correspondence between John Reeves from 1973 to 1994; gig announcements and press clippings; personal and publicity photos; several videocassettes; and forty-three cassette tapes and seven reel-to-reels containing recordings of live performances, interviews, phone conversations, a backstage jam session, and practice and listening sessions, as well as dubs of earlier studio and demo recordings. This article draws from these materials as well as African American newspapers, trade journals, magazines, and published and unpublished interviews.
Smock spent much of her later career working toward a solo album that was never realized, though one of her bands did release an LP, On the S.S. Catalina with the Shipmates 20 Barnett published a comprehensive discography of Smock in the print newsletter Fable Bulletin Violin Improvisation Studies in 1994, with subsequent updates. 21 He also wrote a brief entry on Smock for the New Grove Dictionary of Jazz and profiled her in Strad magazine. 22 Academic sources on Ginger Smock are few and far between. Kristin McGee mentions her briefly in Some Liked It Hot: Jazz Women in Film and Television, noting her work with The Chicks and the Fiddle on CBS. 23 Smock also appears in Linda Dahl's Stormy Weather: The Music and Lives of a Century of Jazzwomen, though Dahl states, incorrectly, that Smock's first professional gigs were with Ada Leonard's all-white big band. 24 Los Angeles music educator and historian Bette Yarborough Cox interviewed Ginger Smock in 1983: A video of that interview is available online and a lightly edited transcription appears in Cox's magisterial Central Avenue-Its Rise andFall (1890-c. 1955). 25 Several interviewees for the UCLA Central Avenue Sounds Oral History Project mention Smock, but she herself was not interviewed for that project. 26 Sherrie Tucker graciously shared with me a transcription of her own 1993 interview with Smock, excerpts of which may be found in Tucker's 1998 article on African American women musicians on Central Avenue. 27 Given that Smock's later career was defined, in part, by her struggle for recording opportunities, a word is in order with regard to the audio and video tapes now at the NMAAHC. Many of the tapes are significant for research purposes, such as a 1975 radio interview on CRFN in Edmonton, Alberta; a 1976 recording of Smock Barnett,"Ginger Smock,Issued and Unissued,[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12]. Updates in Anthony Barnett, "Ginger Smock," FBVIS no. 5 (1995): n.p.; Anthony Barnett, "Ginger Smock," FBVIS vol. 3, no. 10 (1998): 132-38;Anthony Barnett, "Ginger Smock," FBVIS vol. 4, no. 11 (1999): 113; "Fable Bulletin: Violin Improvisation Studies, Pink Page Updates 2001-2017," AB Fable, accessed July 31, 2021, http://abar.net/fbvisupdate.htm (hereafter cited as "Pink Page Updates"). 22 Anthony Barnett, "Smock, Ginger," in The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, ed. Barry Kernfeld (Oxford Music Online, 2003), accessed September 28, 2011, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/J696500; Anthony Barnett, "'The Gingervating Ginger Is Literally a Fireball in Her Act,'" The Strad, November 2010, 66-70. See also Laura Risk, "Ginger Smock: First Lady of the Jazz Violin," Strings Magazine, November/December 2020, 28-34, https://stringsmagazine. com/ginger-smock-first-lady-of-the-jazz-violin/. 23 Kristin A. McGee, Some Liked It Hot: Jazz Women in Film and Television, 1928-1959(Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2009 demo recordings, now available on Strange Blues, while others are copies of demos that she made during her Las Vegas years. Sound quality varies widely. In sum, although these recordings are of significant scholarly interest, substantial curatorial work would be necessary before making selections available to the general public.
"First Lady of the Violin": Building a Career The geographic story of Smock's family, from rural areas of the southeastern United States to urban centers in the North and West, follows common trajectories of the Great Migration. Smock's mother, Ruby May Garrett, was born in Greenwood, Mississippi circa 1891. Her father, Henry James Smock (born circa 1887) was from Shelbytown, Kentucky, though he seems to have spent at least some time in Marion, Indiana as a boy. By 1919, they were married and living in Chicago, and their daughter was born in that city on June 4, 1920. 29 Six years later, due to challenging family circumstances, Smock was sent to live with her paternal aunt and uncle, Georgia and Lawrence Jones, in Los Angeles. She grew up on Central Avenue in a close-knit African American community, delimited by race-restrictive housing covenants, where music was at the center of cultural and economic life, and her teenage years coincided with the swing era and an "explosion of jazz" on the Avenue. 30 Smock was something of a child prodigy. She began private classical violin lessons with Bessie Dones at age eight and, at age ten, performed Kreisler's "Old Refrain" at the Hollywood Bowl to a standing ovation. 31 The following year, she gave a recital at the People's Independent Church of Christ and with the proceeds purchased the violin that she would play throughout her career. 32 At age twelve, she was invited to a film audition. As she later told Sherrie Tucker, "Twentieth Century Fox heard of [me]… They wanted a little girl violinist to play in a movie. And so my teacher came by the school and got me." At this point, however, Smock's story shifts: I walked in there and the studio moguls looked at me from head to toe, a twelve-year-old, with the braids hanging down, like I was something from Mars… They acted like they weren't glad to see me. I didn't receive any kind of welcome… And one of them said, "What are you?" And I didn't know how to answer that other than say, "I'm an American." I come from a mixed marriage, which is obvious. And very proud of that. Thankful. And they said, "Well, my dear, I'm afraid we can't use you. You do not represent any particular group of people." And the tears, I remember, rolled down my cheeks, ran down my chest, and I said, "I'll never come back, even if you 29 Genealogical details from the online database of Ancestry.com Operations Inc.   , 1930-1945Ted Gioia, West Coast Jazz: Modern Jazz in California, 1945-1960(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998 begged me. I'll never come back. I will never see you again." And I walked out… And my teacher was crying, fighting back the tears, because she was humiliated and embarrassed for me. And I guess that did something to where that rejection has stuck to that day. And I'm 73 years old and it's still sitting. 33 As Collins and Bilge note, intersecting dynamics of power and control based on social categories may shape the specific, individual ways that a person experiences bias and "create pipelines to success or marginalization." 34 Although census records list both sides of Smock's family as Black and she grew up in a predominantly African American community, she seems to have self-identified as mixed-race (of African American, Irish American, and Native American heritage) and the above anecdote suggests that Smock understood early on her particular physiognomy as a basis for marginalization. 35 In her letters to John Reeves, Smock refers to herself as an "I.B.I.," or "Irish-Black-Indian," and presumes that others will restrict her opportunities based on her racial identity. 36 "He probably thought it was 'corny,'" she writes to Reeves after he has sent her demo to a potential supporter, adding, "Plus, maybe he doesn't favor IBI's, too. smiles!" 37 When she is invited to participate in the 1984 St. Patrick's Day parade in Las Vegas, she underscores the disconnect between the presumed whiteness of that space and her own racial identity, again softening her statement with a wry "smiles!": "Did I tell you…I rode and played (by special invitation) on the Daughters of Erin float… Yep! The ol' I.B.I. herself. smiles!" 38 The mix of bitterness, defiance, and dry humor that characterizes these and similar remarks in her letters suggests that once Smock had been shunted toward the pipeline to marginalization as a 12-year-old, she carried the experience of that rejection across her career.
Smock's star continued to rise through her teenage years. At age thirteen, she performed "To a Wild Rose" on Clarence Muse's local radio program and, according to Tele-Views, "her rendition so charmed an influential listener that she was given a scholarship at the Music and Art Foundation in Los Angeles." 39 At Jefferson High School, she joined the band and was drum majorette under celebrated orchestra and bandleader Sam Browne, who occasionally had her conduct in his stead. 40 Meanwhile, although she did not study jazz formally, she would often "sit by the phonograph" and 33 Tucker interview. 34 Collins and Bilge, Intersectionality.

35
Census records list Smock's maternal grandmother, Emma Garrett, as "Mulatto" in 1910and "Negro" in 1930and 1940 Records of the Bureau of the Census, National Archives, Washington, D.C.). The genealogical record is incomplete and it is possible that Smock's was one of many African American families to erroneously claim Native American heritage (Henry Louis Gates Jr., "High Cheekbones and Straight Black Hair?," The Root, December 29, 2014, https://www.theroot.com/high-cheekbones-and-straight-black-hair-1790878167). Note that, when Smock was a child, race mixing in the United States was seen primarily through the lens of pathology whereby mixed-race people were physically, mentally, emotionally, and morally weak, leading to infertility and early death (Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe, ed., "Mixed Race" Studies: A Reader

39
"Fiddlin' Around," 8. 40 Cox interview. improvise along to records by violinists Joe Venuti, Stuff Smith,and Eddie South. 41 She also attended big band performances by Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Benny Goodman, and Glenn Miller: "I'd sit there and get really inspired… and go home and try and play a few things that I would hear on violin." 42 As a teenager, Smock was first violinist with the All-City Symphony Orchestra and the "only person of her race" to play with the Junior Philharmonic Orchestra, under conductor Otto Klemperer. 43 She attended Los Angeles City College and the Zoellner Conservatory of Music and, after graduating, led the 48-member Symphonetta ensemble, which performed "light concert music" in Southern California. 44 Indeed, as violinist Kelly Hall-Tompkins has noted, Smock's early life had all the hallmarks of a pre-professional classical music career, and her goal was in fact a position with a symphony orchestra. 45 In the early 1940s, however, African Americans were excluded from professional orchestras in the United States. Smock took a job at a lithography shop, continued to perform at church and community functions, and joined the Southeast Symphony, a community orchestra for African American musicians. 46 Her first jazz gig, in 1943, was unexpected: She received a call from the union to sub for Stuff Smith with Austin McCoy's ensemble at Randini's on Western Avenue and, although she still thought of herself as a "concert violinist and a church violinist," agreed to audition. She went to the club, played along, according to Tele-Views, to a "jazz tempo beat out by the [club] owner," and got the job. 47 Smock's high school classmate Jackie Kelso would later recall her approach to gigging as eminently pragmatic: "[Her attitude was,] you want to make a living playing music? You simply find out what product is being sold on the market and make sure that you can do [it]." 48 Her first band, The Sepia Tones, with Mata Roy on piano and Nina Russell on Hammond organ, performed such favorites as "Rhapsody in Blue," "Persian Market," "Holiday for Strings," and their theme song, "Poinciana." This was the "less challenging swing and novelty repertoire" that, as Tucker states, "employers and audiences generally expected" from all-women groups at the time. 49 By May 1944, the trio was "packing them in" at The Last Word on South Central Avenue. 50 Billboard described them as a "sure-hot" for upscale venues booking "sepian talent" and a solid fit for " [u]pholstered lounges appealing to moderns," and lauded Smock's contributions: "As a hot fiddler she carries the fast tempos well and her boogie-woogie interpretation is out of this world. She is one of the most versatile violinists to hit these parts." 51 Although The Last Word was presumably integrated, given its location, at least some of the trio's performances were likely for all-white audiences. Later in 1944, for instance, they performed at The Rite Spot in Glendale, a sundown town. 52  Jackie Kelso (John Kelson), interview by Steven L. Isoardi, tape number III, side 2, April 7, 1990, Central Avenue Sounds Oral History Project, https://static.library.ucla.edu/oralhistory/text/masters/21198-zz0008zn0c-5-master.html. 49 Tucker interview; Tucker, "West Coast Women," 18. The band was originally called "Nina, Mata and Ginger." For more on "sepia" as a signifier of "upscale blackness," see Andrew or early 1945 when Smock fell ill, "suffering from exhaustion and a near-nervous breakdown." She put down the violin for a year to recover and then returned to performing in Los Angeles clubs. 53 Smock's primary gig from 1947 to 1950 was at The Waikiki Inn on South Western Avenue, where she "dressed Hawaiian, with the grass skirts … the flowers in the hair and the lei." 54 From August to September 1947, she played electric violin with Walter Johnson on piano, a duo which the Los Angeles Sentinel described ambivalently as "definitely different." 55 From March to May 1948, she performed with Emile Williams and Lloyd Glenn on "twin pianos" before returning to a duo lineup with Glenn only. Reviewing the show that June, The Pittsburgh Courier called her a "big hit" with a repertoire that "[ran] the gamut from Bach to Boogie… Talent scouts from Hollywood are casting their eyes her way." 56 Williams returned to the ensemble in July, now on Hammond organ, thus replicating the Sepia Tones instrumentation. "[W]hen it comes to sweet music, this trio have really got something," declared the Los Angeles Sentinel. 57 The ensemble was a steady draw, in part for its musical constancy: Contrary to the belief of many that the public tires of the same type of entertainment over and over again… the musical trio at Mike's Waikiki, over on Western [A]venue, still hold forth nightly and continue to draw upon a large following that never seem to get enough of their kind of music… With all due credit to the talents of these three top-notch artists, like credit must be given to their realization of the type of music their patrons enjoy and their efforts towards adhering strictly to this policy. 58 In Smock's final year at the Waikiki, she replaced Glenn first with pianist Gid Honore and then with guitarist Ceele Burke and pianist Charles (Charlie) Pryme before settling on a trio with Pryme and Williams, both of whom she would continue to perform with over the following decades. 59 53 "Fiddlin Around," 36; Hill, "Bright Future Predicted." 54 Tucker interview. Smock's performances as "Hawaiian" (and later as a "Gypsy"; see below) align with post-war fetishization of the exotic in popular music (see Phillip Hayward, Widening the Horizon: Exoticism in Post-War Popular Music (Sydney: John Libbey, 1999)) as well as a long history of light-skinned African American women performing, on the burlesque and variety stages, "a range of female colonial subjects" (Brown, Babylon Girls, 93). An example contemporaneous with Smock is that of African American performer Juanita Hall adopting Asian personae for the musicals "South Pacific" and "Flower Drum Song" (on the latter, see James Deaville, "The Many Lives of Flower Drum Song : Negotiating Chinese American Identity in Print, on Stage, and on Screen," in China and the West: Music, Representation, and Reception, eds., James Deaville, Hon-Lun Yang, and Michael Saffle (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017), . Such examples asked audiences to willingly suspend disbelief only for the space of a performance and stand in contrast to instances of African American musicians "passing" as non-Black in order to avoid police harassment or violence while on tour, or to access certain professional opportunities. On the latter, see Personnel details taken from display ads in the Los Angeles Sentinel, March 11, 18, 1948; weekly from April 1 to July 1, July 22 to October 28, and November 11 to 25, 1948;December 9 and23, 1948 (1948  Smock's long stints at the Waikiki-where she ended her tenure as the "'Sweetheart of the Strings' and her torrid trio"-framed numerous other engagements in the same years. 60 In 1946, she brought "Ginger and Her Magic Notes" to the Sphinx Club on Sunset Boulevard, with a rhythm section composed of Jack Carrington on piano, Louis Gonzales on guitar, and Bill Thomas on bass. 61 As "First Lady of the Violin" in a revue at The Last Word from October to November 1947, she "scored a smash success," according to The Cleveland Call and Post, and four nightclubs in San Francisco began "bidding against each other for her services." 62 In January 1948, she opened at The Memo on a bill that included blues singers Wynonnie Harris and Joe Turner. 63 The Pittsburgh Courier also has her hosting "her own radio program," Melody Parade, in these years. 64 Smock launched her recording career in the mid-1940s. Her first studio session was in July or August 1946 for Joe Alexander with the Red Callender Quintet, under the name Emma Colbert, but the recording that put her on the proverbial map came in September of that year, when she joined the Vivien Garry Quartet for Leonard Feather's Girls in Jazz project on RCA Victor. 65 Playing a Rickenbacker electric violin, she recorded four 78 rpm sides, including the 12-bar blues "A Woman's Place is in the Groove." 66 "Five west coast girls playing good jazz, including some stuff Smithian sounding fiddle [sic]," wrote DownBeat. 67 Billboard panned the project, however, describing it as of little musical value and useful only as "novel emcee chatter," though they nevertheless considered it "a demonstration that there are femme jazz talents that can make many a feller pack up." 68 Smock's playing on these sides amply demonstrates her hard-edged rhythmic sensibility and blues-based soloing and showcases certain hallmarks of her improvisational approach, such as the use of ostinati to build intensity. The narrow compass and straightforward phrase structure of her solos does, however, point to her relative inexperience at this stage of her career.
An illustrated advertisement in the California Eagle suggests that by 1948, Smock-with her violin -had come to function as a metonym for the successful, elegant, and socially connected African American working woman. The ad shows two women conversing on the phone. One is dressed in bathrobe and slippers, her hair up in a kerchief, and sitting in a torn armchair surrounded by empty liquor bottles. "No Mabel," she says. "I just can't go. I entertained 'at home' last night, and I'm as beat as Lionel Hampton's Drums." Her conversation partner wears a fitted skirt, billowing blouse, and heels. Her hair is loose and wavy, and she leans casually against a cupboard. "Why honey," she replies. "I gave a big party last night too. But I entertained at ASSOCIATED CLUBS and I'm as [fit as] Ginger Smock's fiddle." 69 This advertisement, which ran on at least eight occasions, points to the high degree of name recognition that Smock enjoyed on Central Avenue while still in her twenties and suggests that she and her music denoted independence and professionalism for women in Los Angeles' African American community. In late 1950, although still at the Waikiki, Smock brought her band to the Sphinx Club for an afterhours gig and caught the ear of Klaus Landsberg, an executive at Los Angeles television station KTLA. 70 He invited her to audition and a few months later the Los Angeles Sentinel reported that "PHIL MOORE is rehearsing an eight-piece all-girl combo for a shot at television, which may feature GINGER SMOCK on violin." 71 The show was The Chicks and the Fiddle, which premiered on June 4, 1951-Smock's birthday-with Smock as bandleader, Clora Bryant on trumpet, Willie Lee Terrell on guitar, Jackie Glenn on piano, Anna Glasco on bass, Mattie Watson on drums, and Vivian Dandridge on vocals and as MC. 72 They were "the first band of sepia swingsters to break into west coast TV," with "some really bright and jumping musical routines," according to DownBeat, and one of the first African American bands nationwide to host a regular television show. 73 In the end, The Chicks and the Fiddle ran for just over a month, due to a lack of commercial sponsorship and in spite of a campaign by the Los Angeles Sentinel to "bombar[d]" the station with "letters and phone calls… [to let] sponsors know just how much we appreciate the talent presented." 74 Smock had broken into television, however, and would continue working in the new medium through the remainder of the decade.

"Just Another Problem We Have to Face": Navigating Bias in the Jazz Press
In July 1951, shortly after her television debut, Ginger Smock was profiled in DownBeat by staff reporter Charles Emge, writing under the pseudonym Hal Holly. 75 This profile is ostensibly a column for Emge's "Hollywood Beat" series but also functions as a contribution to the magazine's "Girls in Jazz" series, launched by critic and producer Leonard Feather shortly after his production of the album by the same name. I have located eight "Girls in Jazz" articles from 1951 and 1952, six by Feather and two by Emge, including the latter's profile of Smock. In this section, I interrogate racialized constructions of gender in the "Girls in Jazz" series and argue that both Feather and Emge shaped their writings according to a narrative of perpetual discovery. According to this narrative, women musicians must wait for an external agent-such as a producer, critic, or record label representative-to offer them a "break" in order to achieve professional success. When such breaks do arrive, however, they are never sufficient to lift these women out of obscurity.
Feather's first five "Girls in Jazz" subjects are white women. He typically frames them as brilliantand shapely-musicians facing a bleak future and, by extension, positions himself as their champion: A good-looking redhead who sings, and can play the coolest trumpet this side of Miles Davis-it sounds like the stuff of which hip dreams are made. But it hasn't done Norma Carson much good. 76 Mary Osbourne, girl singer and girl guitarist extraordinary … still has youth and beauty and talent, but it is hard to say how long these qualities will endure before she can be considered to have missed the gravy train forever. Feather's article on pianist Beryl Booker-to the best of my knowledge, his only profile of a Black musician for "Girls in Jazz"-describes her as "the greatest girl pianist since Mary Lou Williams" and "the female Erroll Garner" but "plagued" by a series of "bad breaks": "She was to play the Paris Jazz Festival in 1949 but had to beg off when pneumonia trapped her. She started a new solo career in New York recently but left suddenly…when pleurisy set in." Although he notes that she has performed with Slam Stewart's trio and the Austin Powell quintet, toured with Dinah Washington, and recorded numerous sides, Feather describes Booker as still in need of a "real break." He hopes that she might soon see "the first glimpses" of one due to interest from producer Bod Shad and agent Billy Shaw. 78 The "Girls in Jazz" profiles take a formulaic approach, typically quoting the featured artist on the challenges of being a woman in jazz, detailing her childhood and musical influences, briefly surveying her professional career while emphasizing that she has yet to reach her potential, and, where relevant, highlighting her tracks on the Girls in Jazz album. 79 Charles Emge joined Feather for the series in July 1951 with his profile of Smock, with a headline ("Addition To 'Girls In Jazz' Found On Coast By Holly") that makes no mention of her but rather speaks to a friendly competition between the two men. Emge opens by quoting Smock on the difficulty of "get[ting] anywhere in the musical profession" given that "[a] lot of people think there's some-thing…unladylike about a girl jazz musician… Just another problem we have to face." He dubs her "the No. 1 girl jazz violinist in the business" but documents no professional accomplishments other than her Girls in Jazz sides and a vague reference to her television appearances. The profile ends with a paraphrase of Smock that attributes women musicians' lack of success to a desire for domesticity: "Ginger, despite all the handicaps she's encountered, still thinks the main reason girl musicians rarely make the top brackets is that they find it much easier to marry, settle down and raise families." Emge's narrative style leaps from discovery to discovery: First by Feather, who "pass [es] on" a "tip" to Emge, then Emge's own "belated 'discovery' of Ginger via her guest appearances on local TV shows," and finally a suggestion that Smock might "get her long-deserved and longdelayed 'break' in the new medium" of television. Although the accompanying photo is of Smock, the caption is about Feather and Emge, describing them as intrepid explorers of "every gal musician in sight." 80 This is the crux of the narrative of perpetual discovery: It divests power from the objects of such "discoveries" and instead grants agency to the (male) "discoverers." Effaced are the day-to-day working lives of these women.
Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham has argued for race as a "metalanguage" with a "powerful, all-encompassing effect on the construction and representation of other social and power relations, namely, gender, class, and sexuality." 81 In the early 1950s, DownBeat had a complicated relationship to race. On the one hand, the magazine decried instances of racial discrimination, from the Jim Crow South to Los Angeles' segregated musicians' unions. 82 On the other, it was adamant that such inequities did not exist in jazz-except against white musicians, which it dubbed "Crow Jim." 83 Thus, in May 1951, DownBeat devoted over a full page to an interview with Roy Eldridge in which the trumpeter describes being denied hotel rooms and harassed in venues while on tour with Gene Krupa and Artie Shaw in the 1940s. Nevertheless the headline singles out Eldridge's statement that, after a year of performing in Europe, he wants "never in my life [to] work with a white [American] band again!" In subsequent issues, it is to this assertion that 78 Leonard Feather, "Beryl Best Since Mary Lou?" DownBeat, April 4, 1952, 8. 79 Similarly, Sherrie Tucker notes that publicity materials for the "The Hour of Charm," an all-white women's ensemble, downplayed or omitted the musicians' professional accomplishments, instead framing them as "intrinsically feminine, domestic, and amateur." Tucker's argument is grounded in contemporary conceptions of white womanhood as virginal, innocent, and socially elite (Sherrie Tucker, Swing Shift: "All-Girl" Bands of the 1940s (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 82-83). DownBeat returns, accusing Eldridge of reverse racism. 84 The "Girls in Jazz" series likewise expressed concern that white women might be victims of "Crow Jim"-Feather writes that Marian McPartland has "three hopeless strikes against her" in the eyes of French jazz fans because she is "English, white, and a girl" 85 -but avoided any mention of race for Black women. In short, DownBeat allowed space for collective grievance within jazz for white male musicians, its primary readership, and occasionally extended that collectivity to white women, but not to Black men or women.
White women musicians profiled in DownBeat in the early 1950s fell somewhere between pin-up girl, virginal innocent, and devoted wife. 86 Leonard Feather consistently mentions his white subjects' physical attractiveness and marital status: Pianist Barbara Carroll is a "young brunette" hoping to marry (to Feather's dismay); Marian McPartland is a "tall, laughing chick with [a] happy disposition" and "half of… a 'Dixieland vs. bop' connubial team"; and bassist Bonnie Wetzel -even if her fingers are "covered with rough, ugly calluses… [and] big, bleeding blisters"-is "lovely to behold," but a widow (her husband, trumpet player Ray Wetzel, having died young in a tragic car accident). 87 Charles Emge labels white harpist Corky Hale "as cute as her name" and a natural for "cheesecake photos," and asks if she is dating (she is not). He peppers her with leading questions and reports her non-sequitur responses with glee: When he asks for her "favorite girl musician," for instance, she replies with accolades for the Charlie Ventura sextet and the Woody Herman band. 88 Emge used this aggressive interview style in other articles on white woman instrumentalists, too. The previous year, he had bragged about his attempts to "trap" bandleader Ada Leonard into a "scrap" with fellow bandleader Ina Ray Hutton by asking questions such as, "What about those gowns Ina wears? They're so tight, everyone is waitingand hoping-for an accident." 89 A generous reading suggests that Emge was willing to offer white women instrumentalists his grudging respect provided they demonstrate that they could hold their own against prurient remarks by white male colleagues.
Meanwhile, the two "Girls in Jazz" profiles of Black women-Ginger Smock and Beryl Bookerabsent their bodies entirely. Although Emge "discovers" Smock via the visual medium of television, he makes no mention of her appearance or stagecraft, and his trademark sexual innuendo is lacking. Feather likewise includes no physical descriptors for Booker, instead characterizing her as poor and family oriented: She grew up in a large family that could not afford music lessons, earned her musicians' union dues by waitressing at $5 per hour, supported her young daughter from a short-lived early marriage by playing Philadelphia bars, and later stopped gigging to care for her terminally ill mother. 90 Both men also studiously avoid any mention of race. At times, this borders on the absurd, as when Emge writes that Smock "thought she was headed for the [classical] concert stage… [b]ut, like thousands of other good violinists, she didn't make [it]," with no mention of the fact that the color of her skin would have precluded her from such a career in the early 1940s. This is no politics of respectability, as per Higginbotham, in which the "reform of individual behavior and attitudes" is also "a strategy for reform of the entire structural system of American race 84 Leonard Feather, "No More White Bands For Me, Says Little Jazz," DownBeat, May 18, 1951, 1, 13; "Can't Solve Problems By Running, Lena Tells Roy," DownBeat, June 15, 1951, 1; Leonard Feather, "Little Jazz Goes Color Blind," DownBeat, July 13, 1951, 12. 85 Leonard Feather, "East Saw West; Twain Met," DownBeat, July 13, 1951, 13. 86 Elworth has noted a "dissonance" between the covers and the interiors of DownBeat in the late 1940s and early 1950s, where the former were dominated by "glamorous closeups of white women" while the latter were addressed to "musicians, agents, publicists, and fans" (Steven B. Elworth, "Jazz in Crisis, 1948-1958: Ideology andRepresentation," in Jazz among the Discourses, ed. Krin Gabbard (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 63, 62). DownBeat interiors also contained many "cheesecake" photos in these years, however; see, for instance, photos captioned "No Bop, Sloate's Still Progressive" and "Serious Student," DownBeat, May 18, 1951, 3. relations," for in disallowing race Feather and Emge disallow the possibility of an African American collectivity. 91 Rather, they implicitly connect Black female sexuality, and even corporality, to presumptions of impropriety by granting space to these women only after evacuating any mention of their bodies.
Although credit is due to Feather and Emge for tackling gender bias in the industry, the "Girls in Jazz" profiles suggest a certain voyeurism that watches both Black and white women fail while fetishizing female obscurity. The series uses a variety of mechanisms to circumscribe the place of both white and Black women instrumentalists in DownBeat and, by extension, in professional jazz: Depicting them as passive actors waiting for a break that never comes; emphasizing that technical prowess on an instrument is no guarantee of success for a woman; reassuring a readership of primarily white male musicians that white women could succeed in jazz only so long as they remained physically attractive; and, in the case of Black women, absenting their race and their bodies in order to portray them as morally sound. Taken together, these techniques delineate the different spaces allocated to white and Black women instrumentalists in jazz, while maintaining a near-unbreachable chasm between the categories of "girl" and "professional jazz musician." What complicates the picture in Smock's case is the fact that, as per her later letters and interviews, she also seems to have understood her career in these terms.
"Wherever You Were, People Flocked To": The 1950s and 1960s The 1950s were, in many respects, the height of Smock's career, even as Central Avenue declined as a musical hotspot and cultural hub. 92 She was a recognized television personality, appearing on multiple shows. In early 1952, after she signed a contract as a regular cast member for Dixie Showboat, where she was "The Swinging Lady of the Violin" and "The Lovely Lady of the Violin," Jet magazine noted that she was the "only Negro musician regularly appearing on television on the West Coast." 93 Her gigging continued apace, including slots at Las Vegas' Jungle Club in late 1951 (with the J. C. Heard Trio) and Club Oasis in Los Angeles in early 1952, where she played "many of her own compositions in addition to popular request numbers." 94 In 1953, she toured the West Coast with the Jackson Brothers Orchestra, a jump blues band, performing at the Say When in San Francisco, the Tropics in Portland-where they were billed as a "hard-driving 'go-go' sextette"-and the Ernie Piluso Club in Eugene, Oregon. (Smock would marry Jackson Brothers bassist Harold Jackson, also known as Hal or Hack, in June 1954.) 95 While in San Francisco, Smock was approached by a representative from RCA Victor, who, as she later wrote to Reeves: liked my playing so well, he rented a studio, made the tape, took it back to Hollywood to RCA. He played it for the rest of the execs there, they listened, said it was superb (especially my rendition of "Dark Eyes"[)] and asked him who was the artist. 91 Smock told this story on at least two occasions. In her letter to Reeves, the representative describes her to the executives as "a girl from L.A." Their response: "They told him I had no-name and they could get Joe Venuti instead." 96 When Smock retold this story to Sherrie Tucker in 1993, however, she added an additional detail: When the executives say, "Who on earth is playing the violin?" the representative says, "A colored girl up there in San Francisco," and they respond, "Aw, forget it. We've got Joe Venuti." 97 Putting aside the question of how Smock learned of this in-house exchange at RCA Victor, I note that this anecdote follows the same trajectory as that of her failed Twentieth Century Fox audition at age twelve: An industry insider offers her a potential break only to withdraw it due to her physical presentation-hair, skin tone, gender. As she wrote to Reeves, "Needless to say that 'took the wind out of my sails' in more ways than one." 98 Smock would later link her lack of a record deal to her move to Las Vegas, saying, "[I] never did have anything out that was really worthwhile because I never got a chance to. I never had anyone to record me… I got discouraged and I went on into orchestral work." 99 What might have been is audible in a 1953 recording of Smock's composition "Strange Blues" with Cecil "Count" Carter and his Orchestra (Figure 1; notated in 12/8 to indicate predominant triplet feel). 100 Her "flaming violin," as hailed by the Atlanta Daily World, leads the band through the head and takes the first solo. 101 Smock's playing is rhythmically complex, technically demanding, and alternately strident and delicate, with long melodic lines spun out across the changes. She concludes her otherwise restrained statement of the head with a descending quintuplet and an unexpected mid-bar slide to a B (bars 14-15). A bluesy run leads back to the tonic chord, which Smock underscores with raucous double-stopped sixths intensifying into a Db-C ostinato (bars 16-21). Breaking up the prevailing eighth-note feel, Smock spins out a rapid run of descending sixteenth-note triplets before tracing an ascending G pentatonic scale and then a wild upward slide from a B flat (bars 22-24). The solo seems to draw to a close as the piano takes over, yet Smock's accompanying double-stops grow in volume and intensity and leap to a high A (bars 29-32). With her technical prowess clearly on display, Smock descends chromatically on rapid broken thirds, leaps again to reach the high Db, and counters that with a low G pizzicato (bar 33). Her solo closes by counterposing duplets and quadruplets against the prevailing triplet feel while mapping out ever-more-complex melodic descents, first from G, then from B, and finally from D (bars 33-39). We hear echoes of Stuff Smith's wide vibrato, conspicuous slides, horn-like phrase structures, and thoroughly bluesy harmonic language, as well as the sweetness of tone and technical virtuosity of the likes of Stephane Grappelli and Eddie South, but Smock's assertive, uncompromising sound, bold melodic gestures, and easy virtuosity are unmistakable. "Strange Blues" foregrounds Smock's artistry as a composer and soloist and highlights the loss of having so few recordings of her from the 1950s, a time when she was, in many ways, at the peak of her game as a jazz and blues player.
As a performer, Smock evinced something akin to the early twentieth century "blues culture" of urban, working-class Black women that has been traced by Angela Davis: Sexually expressive, independent, neither jezebel nor prudishly respectable, but rather, in the words of Patricia Hill Collins, "much closer to erotic sensibilities about Black female expressiveness, sensuality, and sexuality." 102 In "Ginger Boogie," recorded with the Jackson Brothers in 1953, Smock openly flirts with a male bandmate who sings, "I love to do the boogie with Ginger, 'cause Ginger puts it on my mind… Ginger, Ginger, Ginger, wanna park right in your stall." After a few half-hearted objections to his request to "make 96 Ginger Smock to Ivy and John Reeves, undated, postmarked May 3, 1974, NMAAHC-Reeves. Underlining in original. 97 Tucker interview. Italics added. 98 Smock to Reeves, undated, postmarked May 3, 1974, NMAAHC-Reeves. 99 "Ginger's phone call #1," cassette tape, NMAAHC-Reeves. 100 Barnett,"Ginger Smock,Issued and Unissued," 4. This recording was reissued on the Strange Blues CD. Smock recorded three additional sides with Cecil "Count" Carter and his orchestra: Cecil "Count" Carter and his orchestra, "What's Wrong with Me?/Strange Blues," with Ginger Smock, Federal 12130, 1953, 78 rpm ("Strange Blues" is the B side); and Cecil "Count" Carter and his orchestra, "I Know, I Know/Gingerbread," with Ginger Smock, Federal 12135, 1953, 78  it," she cheerfully acquiesces and then, on his prompt to "rock me with all your might," launches into a frenzied solo loaded with virtuosic pyrotechnics. 103 This did not preclude her from being a model of civic engagement on other stages, however, and she was a regular performer in church and for benefit events. In 1968, the People's Independent Church awarded Smock a certificate in recognition of 30-plus years of musical service to the community. 104   105 The Philadelphia Tribune described a winning combination of stagecraft, virtuosity, and sex appeal: That fine framed, personality girl with the raven tresses…and her golden violin held this southside spot's customers enthralled for four weeks. Ginger is all of this and more with her terrific driving style of syncopated bow-bending. She is a show all by herself… Stuffy [sic] Smith and his hawkish fiddling and Yehudi Menuhin wrapped into one mold. Despite the difficulty of playing in airish and large-sized clubs her amplified violin turns 'em on…Ginger is the bombshell of the fiddle in more ways than one, if you let the men folks from hereabouts talk!! 106 Smock left the Red Caps for several months in mid-1954 over disagreements regarding "her length of tenure with the organization," but was back with the band later that year for gigs in Las Vegas and Miami. 107 She split with the Red Caps for good in early 1955.
Smock returned to Los Angeles after 2 years on the road and her gigging continued apace: Featured in a "Sexsational! Glamourous! Floor Show" at Club Californian (top billing went to "Jeni, The Cherokee Charmer"); performing at the Club Mar-lin with Harold Jackson and his Tornados; and her only known film appearance, a bit part as an Egyptian court musician in Cecil B. DeMille's "The Ten Commandments." 108 At the Rubaiyat Lounge of the Watkins Hotel in 1956 and 1957 she was "The Bronze Gypsy and her Violin," attracting "large crowds nightly," and her fans at the integrated venue included Hollywood actors Mantan Moreland, Pauline Myers, and Luukialuana Kalaeloa (Luana) Strode; bandleader Cab Calloway; and boxer Kid Gavilan. 109 In 1957, she was "Queen of the Violin" with The All-Star Four (Travis Warren, Hammond organ, Tommy Askew, piano, Sharkey Hall, drums) for a weekly television show on KCOP-TV Channel 13. Originally scheduled for just 13 weeks, some version of this show seems to have continued through 1960, eventually acquiring the title Rhythm Review. 110 Smock also guested on the Larry Finley Show, on Spade Performing "Gypsy"-themed melodies allowed Smock to show off both her classical chops and her jazz skills (and adhered to a common trope of the "Gypsy violinist" in both genres). By her own account, however, it also pointed to something deeper. In the early 1980s, she sent John Reeves a cassette dub of some of her earlier recordings, with spoken commentary before and after each track. After "Play Gypsies, Dance Gypsies," recorded live in 1967, Smock says, "Basically, I presume I was once a Gypsy when I was here before, maybe 500 years ago." And then she laughs awkwardly. 122 Smock's selfidentification as a reincarnated "Gypsy" invokes the romantic stereotype of, in Corradi's words, the "'happy Gypsy,' beautiful and seductive, who freely wanders around the world"-and, in Smock's case, through time. 123 Nevertheless imagining herself as a "Gypsy" reborn into the body of a twentiethcentury African American woman may have offered Smock a way to make sense of the many liminal spaces that she inhabited. She rarely spoke openly of the interstices of identity at which she found herself, instead expressing herself obliquely through offhand remarks and seemingly casual asides-always softened by her trademark "smiles!"-in interviews and letters. She negotiated identity not verbally but musically; through performance, through her choice of repertoire, and through her compositions, such as "When a Gypsy Really Plays the Blues" (Figure 2).

"I Finally Got Discouraged": Ginger Smock in Las Vegas
Ginger Smock recentered her career on orchestral work in the 1970s. In Los Angeles, she performed with the George Rhodes Orchestra at the Now Grove from April 1970 to February 1971, backing Sammy Davis Jr., Johnny Mathis, Connie Stevens, and Dionne Warwick. 124 In Las Vegas, where she and Shipp lived from 1971, she was concertmaster at The Tropicana and then moved to The Flamingo, backing Gladys Knight and the Pips, Jack Jones, Tony Bennett, and others. 125 She played Caesar's Palace for a decade, accompanying Diana Ross, Frank Sinatra, Julie Andrews, and her "favorite star," Sammy Davis Jr. 126 An intriguing note in the Los Angeles Sentinel from 1972 seems to suggest that she had a hand in integrating showroom orchestras: "DON'T know when we have heard such great news as learning that violinist Ginger Smock is now a full member of the Antonio Morrelli Orchestra at the Las Vegas Sands in Vegas … Of course, this is a first." 127 Nevertheless in her correspondence with John Reeves, Smock makes it clear that this work was a regrettable necessity, the disappointing outcome of a jazz career that had never quite taken off as she'd hoped. 128 Reeves cold-called Smock in 1973 to request copies of her recordings, but their conversation quickly turned to her past accomplishments, her hopes for the future, and her frustration at the limitations placed on her career: 122 Ginger Smock: I never got really a chance to play, you know, a real chance… I used to be on television here in Los Angeles. Several shows. A bunch of malarky… But I finally got discouraged and went on into playing orchestra work because I just didn't quite make the grade as a soloist. John Reeves: And yet you play terrific jazz. here. So, pain and all, I don't have much choice." 144 For decades, she had successfully navigated an industry in which she had no choice but to perform both her music and her body when on stage. As she aged, however, fewer and fewer spaces in the industry aligned with the spectacle of her performing body.
As a young woman guesting on Dixie Showboat, Smock was granted airtime in part due to her willingness to play at musical ineptitude. When she was granted space in DownBeat, it was as a "girl" in need of a break and with her race, sexuality, and even corporeality evacuated. To be legible as a professional musician was, in these instances, to pretend that she was not yet one. Smock's story thus offers a particular set of historiographic challenges. On the one hand, she appeared often enough in African American newspapers that we can document her day-to-day life as a working musician with a high degree of accuracy. On the other, her later correspondence and interviews highlight the missing and retracted opportunities that marked her career: The gigs she didn't get, the albums she didn't record, the tours she wasn't offered. Her later recounting of the high points of her career was tempered by bitterness at what she perceived to be a lifetime of exclusion and the premature truncation of that career; 145 in one telling comment, likely a reference to rising star Regina Carter, Smock writes, "How about this young jazz violinist? Good for her. Glad she's accepted." 146 A recuperative history of Smock must ask-following a question posed by Tucker-not only what she did that has been "omitted from historical memory," and how we might "add it back in," but also what she did not do, and how we might reinscribe those absences back into her narrative while still foregrounding her agency. 147 A narrative of perpetual discovery is, in part, an unrealized promise of historiographical space, where the break functions as a turning point between absence and presence. To position a woman as forever on the verge of unachieved success is another means of justifying her exclusion from history. Through a close reading of the full arc of Ginger Smock's professional life, from the nuances of her gigging and recording to her own retrospective reading of her career as one of lost opportunity, this article speaks not only to the rich detail of her life but also to the potential for that detail to be effaced in the blur of pre-discovery obscurity. It is with the sum total of her career-the music, the spectacle, the rejections, the successes, and the longevity-that we must answer the question posed to Smock on Dixie Showboat: "Are you a musician?" Competing interests. The author has no conflicts of interest to declare that are relevant to the content of this article.