"I'm Used to Playing Lead"

Over 100 autobiographies have been written by figures in the world of jazz, but scholarship on these books has been spotty. Most studies of jazz memoir concentrate on a single icon chosen from a short list: Bechet, Armstrong, Holiday, Basie, Ellington, Mingus, and Miles, occasionally accompanied by Art Pepper and the musically challenged Mezz Mezzrow. In other words, apart from Billie Holiday’s Lady Sings the Blues, autobiographies by women in jazz have largely been left out of the critical conversation. Amy Tucker’s 'I’m Used to Playing Lead': Memoirs by Women in Jazz examines the overlooked and under-theorized literary production of women who know what it means, as Nellie Monk put it, to live every day in jazz.

The memoirs discussed in this book are among the most shockingly frank and innovative in the literature of jazz. Tucker brings extensive archival research and cultural context to her re-examination of Holiday’s memoir, as well as to her incisive readings of Ethel Waters’s His Eye Is on the Sparrow, Anita O’Day’s High Times Hard Times, Laurie Pepper’s Why I Stuck with a Junkie Jazzman, and Jeannie Cheatham’s Meet Me with Your Black Drawers On. The author comes to the project as a lifelong fan of the music, but the book is primarily a literary study that draws on her 35 years as a professor (now Emerita) of American literature and cultural studies at a large urban college. Her approach to jazz autobiography reflects major developments in critical theory during this period. Literary analysis has become increasingly layered and nuanced in the wake of ongoing discussions of rhetorical performativity, canon formation, race theory, and gender studies.

Jazz studies have followed the same trajectory. Current scholarship investigates the ways musical and written performances have historically been muted by prevailing cultural assumptions about race and gender. Tucker shows how common themes in jazz autobiographies—professional ambition, endless road travel, self-fashioning and image-tending, sexual freedom, and substance addiction—resonate differently when the narrator is a woman. Equally important, she considers how women’s texts encourage readers to interrogate the systems of valuation and record-keeping on which most surveys of the jazz tradition are built.