Queering Kansas City Jazz

Amber R. Clifford-Napoleone is an associate professor of anthropology and director of McClure Archives and University Museum at the University of Central Missouri. She is the author of Queerness in Heavy Metal Music: Metal Bent.

• List of IllustrationsAcknowledgments1. Rethinking Kansas City’s Jazz Story2. Kansas City’s Jazz Scene3. The Myth of the Wide-Open Town4. Sissy Nights at the Spinning Wheel5. Crib Girls to Criminals6. Queering Dante’s Inferno7. Remembering KCNotesBibliographyIndex

"Clifford-Napoleon offers a taste of how much queerer Kansas City's jazz scene was than historian have previously recognized. She shows, too, how intertwined race and class were with gender experimentation. Her study invites readers to dig deeper into this nearly lost history of a jazz scene that historians thought they knew."-Robin C. Henry, Middle West Reviews "This narrative rights the historical record and adds nuance to our understanding of the intersectionality of race, class, gender, and space in Jazz Age Kansas City."-Kathleen A. Kelly, Kansas History "Clifford-Napoleone reframes the Kansas City jazz scene as one shaped by otherness, and she focuses on the non musical foundations of jazz. While that is one obvious strength of this slender volume, its greatest contribution entails the resurrection of the marginalized cultural pioneers of scene-making-the gender and sexual nonconformists, the working-class Kansas Citians, women, and the plethora of journeyman entertainers, all of whom nourished this scene. In that regard, Queering Kansas City Jazz is an example of the opportunities that intersectionality provides for the reimagination of cultural phenomena."-Aaron Bachhoffer, Journal of Southern History “Queering Kansas City Jazz offers a new and exciting perspective on the jazz scene that accompanied the growth of Kansas City from frontier town to metropolitan city during the early twentieth century. It will potentially change the way in which we understand regional identity and recognize those who were pushed into the margins of our social histories.”-Tammy Kernodle, professor of musicology at Miami University and author of Soul on Soul: The Life and Music of Mary Lou Williams