Researching many of the women’s contributions to jazz is like what I imagine collecting butterflies to be – you go out with your net to many a remote, even secretive spot to track your shy and elusive quarry. Colorful, bright specimens, many of these women in jazz, far from the mainstream, and some of them downright eccentric. There are lots of them making music in small cities, pokey college towns, black neighborhoods, cheesy cocktail lounges – where record producers and jazz reviewers hardly venture. Ladies who have turned their backs on the business side of music, and who have validated themselves through their music. When I was putting together Stormy Weather over a period of several years, I was inspired by the personalities of the jazzwomen – the famous and the obscure, the white and the black, the old and the young. Their grit and determination and pride in their work often helped me keep going when I felt up to my ears in old newspaper dust. The struggles of these women in and out of music, their salty and witty views on life, work, men and the pursuit of happiness, lie at the heart of this book. I wanted not only to fill in the blanks of jazz history by citing their achievements, but also to capture some of the vividness of their lives. Because these are real foremothers, taboo-breakers, independent “mamas.”

from “Preface” to Stormy Weather, 1982.