Jen Wilson begins Freedom Music with the question “When Was Jazz?” (1). It is an allusion to Gwyn Alf Williams's influential history, When Was Wales?, which traced the formation and development of a linguistically and culturally, if not politically, distinct nation. Wilson's book documents the overlooked evolution and influence of jazz in Wales as “the music of ‘protest and rebellion’” (5). In doing so, she makes a major contribution to Welsh women's history and contributes to a growing body of work on transatlantic cultural exchange, specifically the exchange “of working-class ideas, performance and artistic variables from one (black American) working-class culture to another (white Welsh)” (175).

Much of the research is located in one town in south Wales, Wilson's native Swansea—a vibrant “frontier” town built around heavy industry and a busy port, in which Welsh- and English-speaking Wales rubbed shoulders. One might expect the story of jazz in Wales to be about one-way influence and adoption, but the book's chapters begin with “The Life, Times and Music” of the Swansea abolitionist Jessie Donaldson (1799–1889). Having founded a school in Swansea, in her forties she married one of the Donaldsons of Ohio. Originally Unitarians from Wales, the Donaldsons counted Frederick Douglass and Harriet Beecher Stowe among their friends, and their homesteads along the Ohio river formed an important part of the underground railroad. Wilson identifies a strong and long-standing antislavery movement in Swansea, too, no doubt supported by the family of the American Quaker and abolitionist William Dillwyn, who put down roots in the town. As a world-leading producer of copper, however, Swansea also had close ties to the slave trade, as evidenced by a recently unearthed manilla—a token used for purchasing slaves—manufactured at the Hafod copper works.

From transatlantic abolitionism, Freedom Music explores blackface minstrelsy (the popular and culturally complex Welsh adoption and pastiche of African American music and performance that “created a new hybrid for local consumption” [59]), the stirring slave songs of the Fisk Jubilee Singers, and the rise of female performers and musicians during the First World War. By the twentieth century, Swansea was the location of a thriving café culture where homegrown and visiting jazz musicians and performers were in great demand, though radio would ultimately replace many of them amidst a backlash against jazz and a panic about “Jews and Negro morals” (201).

In the final chapter, the perspective shifts away from a vibrant Welsh jazz scene to address the misogynistic views peddled in influential paper, the Melody Maker, which declared that women were granted stage time only because “they are cheap and nice to look at” (236). Meanwhile, Welsh jazz was either ignored or patronized in an occasional column, “South Wales Look You.” The denigration of female musicians was robustly challenged in the letters pages at the time, though Wilson pointedly remarks that “old preconceived notions” that posit jazz as a “male art form” may still “occasionally be sniffed wafting on hot air” (231–32).

Fronting Freedom Music is an unpublished poem, “Rescuers” by David Hughes, penned “[i]n praise of local historians” (xv). It celebrates the passion, diligent research, and activism of those often dismissively called “local historians” (xv). This volume has all the advantages, as well as some of the drawbacks, of a local history. It is packed full of primary sources, abounding in lyrics, newspaper advertisements and clippings that reveal the creativity, entertainments and protests of (particularly) working-class Swansea. The waitresses’ strike at the Baltic Lounge café in 1920, supported by a sit-in of miners in their pit dirt but not by the unionized musicians who also worked at the café, deserves a chapter in itself. The book is full of such gems. In its excavation of forgotten female activists, artistes, musicians, directors, producers, and pioneers, we glimpse a vibrant and diverse musical and intersectional feminist history. The research is scrupulous (though an editor should have caught some of the slips in delivery before the book went to press), and the stories are all the more engaging for the way Wilson shares snippets of her paths of discovery: this is history as detective story.

Where the discussion is weaker is in some of the attempts to frame the cultural and historical exchange on a bigger canvas. Though Wilson builds on some important studies of transcultural exchange, there are some shaky efforts to pursue parallels between Welsh and African American experience, as when the brutal physical and sexual oppression of enslaved women is implicitly compared with the treatment of Welsh women as “second-class citizens” (99) within the United Kingdom. Undeniably exploited as domestic servants, held up as examples of moral failure by Victorian government officials, and castigated for adherence to the Welsh language (provocatively described by one Victorian commentator as “having been the language of slavery” [100]), the comparison between Welsh working-class women and African American slaves is clumsy, at best.

Elsewhere, Wilson is much more adept at suggesting affinities and correspondences between African Americans and the Welsh, including the warm reception of the Fisk Jubilee Singers who visited Swansea on numerous occasions from the 1870s to raise money for the university founded to educate newly emancipated slaves and their descendants. Wilson imagines local women's responses to the “positive political voice” (96) of the group, and audiences certainly snapped up copies of the Fisk Jubilee Songbook. By 1907, the group was back, this time fund-raising for “‘the poor of Swansea’ . . . in recognition of the financial support Swansea had given Fisk University in the past” (107). What the Fisk Jubilee Singers made of that other, competing, transatlantic tradition of blackface minstrelsy between which their shows were often sandwiched is, as Wilson wryly notes, unrecorded.

Jen Wilson's work, in these pages and as founder of the Jazz Heritage Wales, exemplifies how the local and specific can have much wider significance. With its story of female influence in the development and reception of a transatlantic tradition of protest and musical innovation and its mapping of contact points between Welsh and African American women's history, Freedom Music deserves to find a wide audience on both sides of the Atlantic.