The Original Pinettes and Black Feminism in New
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STREET QUEENS: THE ORIGINAL PINETTES AND BLACK FEMINISM IN NEW ORLEANS BRASS BANDS A THESIS SUBMITTED ON THE SEVENTEENTH DAY OF JUNE 2015 TO THE DEPARTMENT OF MUSIC IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS OF THE SCHOOL OF LIBERAL ARTS OF TULANE UNIVERSITY FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF MUSICOLOGY BY ______________________ Kyle DeCoste APPROVED: __________________ Matt Sakakeeny, Ph.D. Director __________________ Daniel B. Sharp, Ph.D. __________________ Karissa Haugeberg, Ph.D. © Copyright by Kyle DeCoste, 2015 All Rights Reserved TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS……………………………………………………………..iv Chapter 1. INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………….1 Band History Subject Position Methodology Organization 2. FROM STREETS TO STAGE……………………………………………12 A Brief Spatial History of the New Orleans Brass Band From Silence to Speech Coming to Voice Creating a Space for Self-Definition 3. SONGS AS KNOWLEDGE………………………………………………49 Casanova Baby/Valerie Get A Life 4. THE FIELD OF CULTURAL PRODUCTION…………………………..77 You Got to Tip the Band Branding the Band On the Way Up ii 5. CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………..103 BIBLIOGRAPHY…………………………………………………………………....106 BIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………………...113 iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Throughout the process of writing this thesis, I was surrounded by an intelligent and loving group of friends/colleagues who not only acted as sounding boards for my ideas, but also provided diverse and insightful perspectives that have changed the way I see the world. I am hugely grateful for the communal academic life you’ve provided. Thanks go out to the colleagues, fellow grad students, and friends who have given me valuable input throughout: Nick Benoit, William Buckingham, Susanne Hackett, Colin Kemper, Shane Lief, Alix Riviere, Daniella Santoro, Sarah Senette, and Chris Willoughby. I am very grateful to everyone who took the time to sit down with me for interviews: Tylita Curtain, Veronique Dorsey, Dee Holmes, Christie Jourdain, Kendra Robertson, and Janine Waters. Their willingness to give of their time and share their perspectives has enriched this thesis substantially. I hope that the interviews were enjoyable, or at the very least, bearable. Thank you to the crew at Bullet’s Sports Bar (especially Kendra) for your kindness and company on many Friday nights. Thanks are due to my thesis committee, Matt Sakakeeny, Dan Sharp, and Karissa Haugeberg, who not only mentored me throughout this process, but also became friends somewhere along the way. I am indebted to all of you for your wise words. Matt not only laid the groundwork for my research, but also constantly challenged me, putting me in plenty of academic situations in which I felt uncomfortable. I promise I mean that in the best way. Dan encouraged me to embrace my tongue-tied abstractions and showed me iv plenty of creative ways to do scholarship. Karissa encouraged me to rely on my own voice and have confidence in my ability as a scholar. I would certainly be remiss were I not to mention my second unofficial advisor, Sue Mobley, who was patient (bot not too patient!) for me to get hip to intellectual activism and black feminist concerns. She never hesitated to call me out on some of my more naïve ideas, but was also quick to congratulate me when I had some success. All four of you have mentored me and substantially influenced who I want to be as a person. I am hugely indebted to my girlfriend, Maddie Schwartz, for her love, companionship, and for always making me feel like I was capable. She not only accompanied me on a good number of ethnographic excursions, but also took the time to read my thesis aloud so I could tighten up my prose. Microsoft Sam has nothing on her. Thanks for always making me feel loved and capable. Thanks especially go to my mom and dad, Kathy and Clem DeCoste, for being okay with me traveling 3,465 kilometers (2,153 miles) away, for always encouraging me to do what I love, and for the support that they’ve given me over the years. Throughout the various headaches I’ve given you, I hope I’ve at least made you proud. Finally, this thesis would not exist were it not for the cooperation and patience of all of the Pinettes: Tylita Curtain, Veronique Dorsey, Nicole Elwood, Casandra French, Natasha Harris, Dionne Harrison, Jazz Henry, Dee Holmes, Christie Jourdain, and Janine Waters. I am humbled by your insight, musical ability, work ethic, and willingness to embrace this strange Canadian. While there are limits to my words, I hope I’ve at least done some justice to you and your music. v 1 1. INTRODUCTION The musical traditions of New Orleans are largely patriarchal. As the predominant sonic signifier of New Orleans, the brass band amplifies this gender bias more than any other musical tradition in the city. Brass band song lyrics can at times revolve around the subjugation and objectification of women, which renders the brass band canon tricky to access for female musicians. These symbolic issues become socially reified in the male control of instruments and the barriers to professionalization experienced by female musicians. Indeed, female brass band musicians are in the minority, constituting few more than ten musicians in a city with somewhere in the vicinity of fifty bands, all of which feature about ten musicians. The available literature on brass bands has thus far focused almost exclusively on black men and, mostly due to the relative absence of women in brass bands, neglects to view gender as a category of analysis, reflecting the gender bias of the scene at large. In 2013, my advisor Matt Sakakeeny published his book on the city’s brass bands called Roll With It: Brass Band’s in the Streets of New Orleans. It became the first ethnographic study of brass bands in contemporary culture and signaled an important turning point not only in scholarship on brass bands, but New Orleans music in general. Instead of simply celebrating the city’s music, Matt1 brings the music into its social 1 Throughout this thesis, I make reference to members of the band I study by their first names. I will refer to those whom I know personally by their first names and those whom I don’t know by last names for the sake of consistency. This equalizes authority and positions my subjects as experts in their field. 2 context in a way that is tuned to the concerns of its creators who are often subject to urban violence, poverty, and racial and economic marginalization. With the turn in New Orleans music scholarship toward concerns of social justice, a foundation was set for me to consider gender as another category of analysis. The silence of women in his study was not something unbeknownst to him when the book went to press as he readily acknowledged that his “focus on black men perpetuates the marginalization of black women in scholarly studies.”2 Because there are so few women who play brass band instruments, the scholarship gives voice to the experiences of the majority of brass band musicians in the city. After all, hegemonic masculinity (the dominance of masculine men over more feminine gender identities) is a relational construct, dependent on something or someone outside of it to exist.3 This thesis seeks to introduce gender as a key element to brass band research by studying the only current exception to male dominance in New Orleans’ brass band community, an all-female brass band named the Original Pinettes Brass Band. Their example forces us to reconsider the domain of brass band music not only as one where brass band instruments articulate power, but where gender is a primary element in the construction and consolidation of this power. Band History In 1991, the Pinettes got their start at St. Mary’s Academy, an all-girls Catholic private school. Taking direction from bandleader Jeffery C. Herbert, they began playing 2 Matt Sakakeeny, Roll With It: Brass Bands in the Streets of New Orleans (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), 202. 3 Patricia Hill Collins, Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), 186; R.W. Connell, Masculinities, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). 3 New Orleans style jazz in what Mr. Herbert at the time called a “Dixieland band.” At the school’s spring concert in 1992, the band played the Rebirth Brass Band’s “Freedom”4 and the crowd went wild, giving Herbert the idea that he could fashion the musicians to play contemporary brass band music rather than traditional New Orleans jazz.5 Some of the band members’ parents were having difficulties paying tuition to St. Mary’s, so Herbert’s idea was to capitalize on the possible commercial success of an all-female brass band to pay for tuition to the school. He dubbed the band the Pinettes, a feminization of the name of his own band, the Original Pinstripe Brass Band. For the 1993-‘94 school year, Herbert left St. Mary’s to direct the band at John McDonogh High School, but he continued to manage the Pinettes, many of them having already graduated from the school. In 1998, he left New Orleans to become assistant band director at Southern University in Baton Rouge, at which point management was turned over to the band members. During this period, the Pinettes played in second lines and released a cassette tape, which garnered them very little success outside New Orleans. As with many brass bands in the city, the Pinettes have had a lot of turnover in membership over the years. In the current ten-piece lineup, only Christie Jourdain, Dee Holmes, and Casandra French are original members and, even then, they have not been members over the entire twenty-four-year career of the band, having left town for college and other such endeavors at various points in their careers.