The "Baby Dolls"

by Kim Marie Vaz

  84. Interview with author, June 24, 2011.

  4. A NEW GROUP OF BABY DOLLS HITS THE STREETS

  1. Mitchell, All on a Mardi Gras Day.

  2. Guillory, “Under One Roof.”

  3. Carolyn Ware, “Anything to Act Crazy: Cajun Women and Mardi Gras Disguise,” Journal of American Folklore 114 (2001): 240.

  4. Karen Trahan Leathem, “A Carnival According to Their Own Desire: Gender and Mardi Gras in New Orleans, 1870–1910,” Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina, 1994.

  5. Tallant, Mardi Gras… as It Was, 127.

  6. Leathem, “A Carnival According to Their Own Desire,” 200.

  7. Ibid., 232.

  8. Ibid., 224

  9. Tallant, Mardi Gras… as It Was, 239–41.

  10. Maurice M. Martinez, “A Conversation on Artist John McCrady,” Xavier Review 13 (1993): 2.

  11. Ralph L. Wickiser, Caroline Durieux, and John McCrady, Mardi Gras Day (New York: Henry Holt, 1948), 16–17.

  12. “Shotgun” refers to an architectural style. This wooden structure is narrow with all the rooms lined up in a row. A hallway travels from the front of the house to the rear. The houses are erected on raised brick piers with a small porch, a roof apron, and Victorian lace ornamentation.

  13. The seventeenth-century French playwright, satirized because of the shape of his nose.

  14. Wickiser et al., Mardi Gras Day, 6–7.

  15. Blake Woods, personal communication, October 31, 2011.

  16. R. McKinney, “History of the Baby Dolls,” 1939, Folder 423, Federal Writers’ Project, Cammie G. Henry Research Center, Watson Library, Northwestern State University of Louisiana.

  17. Tucker, “A Feminist Perspective on New Orleans Jazz Women,” 16.

  18. Jeff Hannusch, “The South’s Swankiest Night Spot: The Legend of the Dew Drop Inn” (1997), www.satchmo.com/ikoiko/dewdropinn.html.

  19. The Baby Dolls and Gold Diggers were seen by outside observers as a largely working-class female performative tradition as late as the 1950s. See Munro S. Edmonson, “Carnival in New Orleans,” Caribbean Quarterly 4 (1956): 233–45.

  20. Interview with Kenneth Leslie, August 8, 2010.

  21. Burns, Keeping the Beat on the Street, 101.

  22. Jonathon Green, Cassell’s Dictionary of Slang (New York: Sterling Publishing Co., 2005).

  23. Marybeth Hamilton, “Sexual Politics and African-American Music; or, Placing Little Richard in History,” History Workshop Journal 46 (1998): 160–76.

  24. Thaddeus Russell, “The Color of Discipline: Civil Rights and Black Sexuality,” American Quarterly 60 (2008): 101–28.

  25. Kalamu ya Salaam, “New Orleans Mardi Gras Indians and Tootie Montana,” (1997), www.louisianafolklife.org/LT/Virtual_Books/Hes_Prettiest/hes_the_prettiest_tootie_montana.html (accessed June 12, 2011).

  26. VanSpanckeren, “The Mardi Gras Indian Song Cycle,” 44.

  27. Ibid., 53.

  28. Regis, “Second Lines, Minstrelsy, and the Contested Landscapes of New Orleans Afro-Creole Festivals,” 472–504.

  29. Ibid., 473.

  30. Interview with Mercedes Stevenson, March 26, 2011.

  31. Circa late 1930s, early 1940s, Twelfth Ward Baby Dolls.

  32. Given the relationship between social and pleasure clubs and local Black businesses, Alma Batiste’s group may have received sponsorship from a local club in town at that time called the Golden Slipper.

  33. Jerry Brock, “The Million Dollar Baby Dolls,” New Orleans Beat Street Magazine 2 (2004): 7–8.

  34. Barker, interview.

  35. H. Brook Webb, “The Slang of Jazz,” American Speech 12 (1937): 179–84.

  36. McKinney, “A Real Baby Doll Speaks Her Mind,” 3.

  37. Michael Proctor Smith, A Joyful Noise: A Celebration of New Orleans Music (Gretna, La.: Pelican Publishing Co., 1990), 61.

  38. “Black Astrologers Predict the Future,” Ebony (April 1969): 60–79. Much of the information in this paragraph came from a personal communication with Elaine Gutierrez, April 5, 2012.

  39. Interview by Kim Vaz and Millisia White, April 25, 2010.

  5. “WE ARE NO GENERATION”

  1. See Charles Chamberlain, “The Goodson Sisters: Women Pianists and the Function of Gender in the Jazz Age,” Jazz Archivist 15 (2001): 8; and Tucker, “A Feminist Perspective on New Orleans Jazz Women,” 199.

  2. Tallant, Mardi Gras… as It Was, 109.

  3. Rick McRae, “‘What Is Hip?’ and Other Inquiries in Jazz Slang Lexicography,” Notes 57 (2001): 574–84.

  4. Vincent J. Panetta, “‘For Godsake Stop!’ Improvised Music in the Streets of New Orleans, ca. 1890,” Musical Quarterly 84 (2000): 5–29.

  5. Terry Monaghan, “Why Study the Lindy Hop?” Dance Research Journal 33 (2001): 124–27.

  6. Scott DeVeaux, “The Emergence of the Jazz Concert, 1935–1945,” American Music 7 (1989): 6–29.

  7. Rhonda McKendall, “Remember When? Carnival on Claiborne Is Relived,” New Orleans States-Item, February 1, 1978, B-10.

  8. Tallant, “Negroes in the Carnival.”

  9. Interview with Resa (Cinnamon Black) Wilson-Bazile, January 2011 (about the 1970s era).

  10. Interview with Miriam Batiste Reed, April 22, 2010, Millisia White co-interviewer, and interview with Eva Perry and Geanie Thomas, April 25, 2010.

  11. Interview with Resa (Cinnamon Black) Wilson-Bazile, January 2011.

  12. Katrina Hazzard-Gordon, “Afro-American Core Culture Social Dance: An Examination of Four Aspects of Meaning,” Dance Research Journal 15 (1983): 21–26.

  13. Noah Bonaparte Pais, “Rally of the Dolls,” Gambit, February 16, 2009, www.bestofneworleans.com/gyrobase/rally-of-the-dolls/Content?oid=1256917&mode=print.

  14. Interview with Deja Andrews, April 25, 2010.

  15. Photos of Antoinette K-Doe, Miriam Reed, Geannie Thomas, and Eva Perry at this event can be found in Angelo and Peter Coclanis, “Jazz Funeral: A Living Tradition,” Southern Cultures 11 (2005): 86–92.

  16. Geannie Thomas (an Ernie K-Doe Baby Doll), interview by Kim Vaz and Millisia White, April 25, 2010.

  17. Interview with Millisia White (founder, New Orleans Society of Dance’s Baby Doll Ladies, and “Lady Bee”), April 22, 2010.

  18. Ibid.

  19. Lois Nelson, Merline Kimble, and Patricia McDonald, interview by Kim Vaz and Millisia White, April 25, 2010.

  20. Helen A. Regis, “Blackness and the Politics of Memory in the New Orleans Second Line,” American Ethnologist 28 (2001): 752–77.

  21. Interview with Kenethia “Lady N.O. Cutie” Morgan, April 24, 2010, New Orleans Society of Dance’s Baby Doll Ladies.

  22. Davieione (Beauty from the East) Fairley, April 24, 2010, New Orleans Society of Dance’s Baby Doll Ladies.

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