Angela Smith, working musician and music journalist, provides an admirably comprehensive survey of women drummers who performed, as her subtitle states, in a wide variety of genres. Smith begins with a brief historical survey of women percussionists culled from archaeological digs in Egypt and Mesopotamia, arguing that: ‘There was actually a time in history when women were the primary percussionists – around and about 2300 bce’ (p. xvi). This is no small claim, especially when set against the prevailing view of women instrumentalists, particularly percussionists given the gendering of instrumentation in which pianos and flutes have been ‘properly’ feminised while drums and trumpets remain masculinist instruments. Smith synthesises scholarship to support her claim of historical precedent and convincingly argues the legitimacy of the long historical record of women percussionists. Even if a reader doubted the claims of the first chapter, the rest of Smith's book is a convincing rejoinder to the claim that ‘girls can't (or shouldn't) be drummers’.
Smith is careful to focus on women drummers who ‘have been at the top of their class in popular and contemporary jazz, country, blues, and rock’ and is uninterested in discussing ‘classical music, drum circles, or drums used in a spiritual or goddess context’ (pp. xvii–xviii). After the brief survey that quickly moves into the 19th century, Smith begins the central part of her book. Moving chronologically, for the most part, beginning in the early 19th century, Smith begins with a look at minstrelsy, which is a commendable way to begin a modern popular music history. Often overlooked in jazz and rock histories, blackface minstrelsy arguably lays the foundation for the popular music culture that follows and continues to make its presence felt in various ways (compare the braggadocio of the black ‘bad man’ found in both gangsta hip-hop and zip coon songs and skits, for example). A short discussion of vaudeville, including mention of ‘all-girl’ bands introduces a theme Smith threads throughout the rest of the book – namely, sex appeal and beauty often trumped musical talent in the 19th and early 20th centuries and the critical assessment it incurred by either reducing a woman instrumentalist to a beauty queen or, later, dismissing obvious musical talent in order to focus on a woman's sex appeal (or lack of it), and often simultaneously within the same review, continues to haunt women drummers today.
Smith's narrative continues with the ‘jazz age’ of the ‘roaring 20s’. In addition to introducing readers to a number of women musicians and ensembles, she also provides a capsule view of the ‘school band’ phenomenon of the time that would see fruition in the next decade and during WWII when all-girl school bands ‘graduated’ into full-fledged professional ensembles. Her narrative really picks up steam as she moves into the 1930s and 1940s as women instrumentalists form professional entities rather than being relegated, as Smith notes of common descriptions of the time, as either a ‘canary’ (pretty vocalist) or ‘fem on the 88s’ (p. 28). Due to the segregation of the time, it makes sense that Smith tracks the ensembles by race, focusing first on Ina Ray and Her Melodears and the extremely popular Phil Spitalny all-female ‘Hour of Charm’ orchestra, whose members were hired as much for their physical beauty as for their musical abilities. Smith then turns her attention to the all-black ensembles such as the International Sweethearts of Rhythm, notable for their mixed-race membership, which caused them some hardship when touring the Jim Crow American South. They enjoyed a high-profile career while they lasted, eventually touring Europe in the wake of the end of WWII.
The 1940s–1960s are dealt with in short order in Chapters 5–8, although it was surprising to see the 1950s and 1960s share Chapter 8, given the increasing number of women drummers throughout the earlier WWII period. Smith explains this as women returning to the domestic sphere after the war as GIs returned home. The 1970s and 1980s are meatier chapters, as one might expect, and there is attention given to sadly forgotten bands such as Fanny, Palmolive and, of course, the Runaways. There is a short mention of Olivia Records, a ‘women's music’ label, and while it is understandable given the ‘women's music’ movement of the time's focus on acoustic singer-songwriters, I missed hearing more about drummer Janet ‘Jake’ Lampert and her electric rock band, BeBe K'Roche, signed to the label due, one assumes, to a certain political outlook and philosophy. This brings up a shortcoming of the book. There is quite a bit of synthesising from secondary research materials (e.g. an artist's website, other scholarship) and it often means sometimes cursory mentions of artists and movements associated with them that add little to thinking about the gendered implications of the category, ‘women drummer’. While Smith beats the drum (pardon the pun) repeatedly about the fact that women are not ‘supposed’ to be drummers, the encyclopaedic nature of the book begins to wear thin and one wishes for a deeper engagement with a shorter list of drummers.
The reliance on secondary sources, moreover, becomes another strain on a reader (there is a heavy reliance on Sherrie Tucker's work, for instance). While Smith seems invested in producing a text suitably interesting for a non-academic readership, the inconsistency in citational practices (sometimes there are citations and, more often, there are not) as well as an explicit reliance on others’ work often obscures Smith's own contribution.
After a more in-depth look at women drummers in rock through the 1980s to the present day, there are brief surveys of women drummers in country (Chapter 17), the blues (Chapter 18), and a slight return to jazz with a look at contemporary women jazz drummers (Chapter 19). Chapter 20 closes the book with an interesting hodgepodge of women drummers beginning with popular ‘crossover’ classical percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie and experimentalist Ikue Mori and moving quickly through a number of drummers in various genres (e.g. samba, Celtic rock) before ending with Alessandra Belloni, a specialist in ‘traditional Southern Italian folk dances and percussion’ (p. 225) and artist-in-residence at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City.
In sum, Smith provides a whirlwind tour of women drummers, past and present, filling in a much-needed niche in music historiography. One wishes that she had dug deeper into fewer musicians, though, and provided a meatier analysis of the ways in which gender and drumming practices have been effective (or not) disturbances in the patriarchal order she so clearly means to destabilise and decentre – an agenda I fully support. I look forward to her future contributions and recommend this effort, serious caveats notwithstanding.
