Sherrie Tucker

Beyond the Brass Ceiling: Dolly Jones Trumpets Modernity in Oscar Micheaux's Swing!

In this essay, the author explores the trumpet solos of Dolly Jones (Armenra, Armenera) in Oscar Micheauxs 1938 film, Swing!, as a part of a search for analytical frameworks that can address moments in the interwar years when trumpeting jazzwomen represented modernity. By explicitly incorporating modernity into an intersectional analysis of gender, race, and jazz, this paper considers moments when women playing instruments and styles associated with men were not only seen as novelties, or as musicians who happened to be women, but as evidence of new generations and new possibilities—and, in this case, hopes for black modernity in the late 1930s.