A Woman's Place: Staging Femininity in Live Music from Jenny Lind to the Jazz Age

This chapter draws from a larger, ongoing research project concerning the history of American live music. It begins with some observations concerning the challenge of studying the subject of 'live music' in historical perspective and understanding 'liveness' as a historical phenomenon. There are compelling reasons to make gender central to the history of live music, which the chapter addresses using a series of examples starting with the mid-nineteenth century Swedish concert singer Jenny Lind. Lind's established a model of feminine musical performance in which virtue was paramount. A different sort of alternative stage femininity could be found in the growing visibility, toward the end of the nineteenth century, of a type of popular female singer dubbed the 'coon shouter'. The assumption of feminine virtue was ideologically crucial to contain what might otherwise have appeared to be an irreconcilable contradiction: 'respectable' women of the mid-nineteenth century were not expected to assume such public visibility.