Mick Hartley

Dolly Jones with the Leon Gross Orchestra. From the 1938 film "Swing!":

Born in Chicago in 1902, she was the first female trumpet player to be recorded, in 1926 with Albert Wynn's Gut Bucket Five.

Read all about her here:

Roy Eldridge later remembered hearing Dolly play during this time [the 1920s and 30s]. He recalled walking down the street and stopping at a club to listen to the talented trumpeter. He saw Dolly sitting inside at the bar holding her trumpet and he asked if she was waiting for her trumpeter boyfriend. She, he said, looked at him with a cool, withering look and stated simply, "I am the trumpet player."  […]

It was in 1937 that she was recruited by Oscar Michauex. In 1938, the Black filmmaker—famous for his willingness to address racial issues in his films—announced the completion of three new films. One of these was a musical romance called Swing!, and it is in this film that Dolly appears. Oscar Michauex famously refused to shy away from issues such as African-American job discrimination, rape, lynching, and violence. Unfortunately for Dolly, this meant that his films often fell foul of the state censors, meaning that many of his films are largely forgotten today.

We cannot be certain when Dolly filmed her scenes, but the autumn/winter of 1937 would make most sense, given that she was in New York at the time. Dolly has no lines in the film but her trumpet solos take centre stage and are the one remarkable feature of the film. Dolly's performance in Swing! does not conform to any "standard" female role of the time. She is neither clown, whore, mother, alluring dancer, nor noble savage. Instead, she appears to be exactly what she is: a brilliant musician. This portrayal for the time is quite remarkable.

In her first performance she is seen wearing a conservative white dress of virginal simplicity—this, in itself, is in marked contrast to the historical tendency to portray African-American women (especially in the musical field) as sexually available.

Confident, Dolly stands in front of the all-male band, mistress of all she surveys, as behind her Leon Cross leads her accompaniment. Dolly's playing style was known as "hot, being fast and syncopated with a toe-tapping rhythm."

There is, however, nothing here in Dolly's performance to detract from her music. There is none of the clown actions of Tiny Davis, nor the choreographed actions of Snow, who played on her sexuality through dance and costume. Dolly simply stands and plays, and by doing so she makes a stand for feminism over sexuality. Bud Freeman said of her performance that, "She had no affectation, no showmanship" and yet held the stage not through her sexuality but through her talent.

She is aware of the camera but only in the sense that she completely ignores it, going against the familiar stereotype of a woman playing to the camera. This in itself for a female jazz musician is pioneering. Dolly Jones is one of the earliest representations of a Black woman on screen who is portrayed as talented and attractive, but also chaste and modest.

There is no evidence to suggest that these factors were deliberate, but Dolly's mere presence, as Kathy Ogren writes, "Disrupted and challenged conventional racist representations of Black female jazz musicians." […]

Dolly continued to play right up until her death in August 1975, though details about her later life are scarce.

Dolly Jones smashed barriers in the jazz world, both as the first female trumpeter to lay down a record and as the first to showcase her purely musical talent in film. Her playing was so beautiful, so visceral, that even in her known recordings her playing has been compared favorably to her hero Louis Armstrong.

Yet she remains forgotten, for every door she opened for female musicians, she lived to see them slam back. Yet she continued to play, and she deserves to be remembered for what she was: a groundbreaking trumpet player, who wrote an important chapter in the history of women's jazz.