The Lady Swings

Memoirs of a Jazz Drummer

Dottie Dodgion, Wayne Enstice

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780252085512
  9780252043598
• eBook ISBN:
  9780252052477
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music Biographies

Dottie Dodgion is a jazz drummer who played with the best.  A survivor, she lived an entire lifetime before she was seventeen. Undeterred by hardships she defied the odds and earned a seat as a woman in the exclusive men's club of jazz. Her dues-paying path as a musician took her from early work with Charles Mingus to being hired by Benny Goodman at Basin Street East on her first day in New York. From there she broke new ground as a woman who played a "man's instrument" in first-string, all-male New York City jazz bands. Her inspiring memoir talks frankly about her music and the challenges she faced, and shines a light into the jazz world of the 1960s and 1970s.
 
Vivid and always entertaining, The Lady Swings tells Dottie Dodgion's story with the same verve and straight-ahead honesty that powered her playing.

A Variety Best Music Book of 2021

PART I

THE CALIFORNIA YEARS

SCENE ONE

On the Road

I was born on September 23, 1929, a month before Black Tuesday and the start of the Great Depression. The world and I were headed for a roller-coaster ride. The only difference was mine lasted longer.

Christened Dorothy Rosalie Giaimo (I am of Sicilian descent on my father’s side), my birthplace was the southern California city of Brea but I spent most of my childhood up north in the Bay Area. My father, Charles Giaimo, was born July 27, 1907. A self-taught drummer, he loved jazz. At twenty-one, he was on the road in the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee when he met my mother, sixteen-year-old Ada Martha Tipton. Born April 12, 1912, she was an exotic mix of Cherokee and Irish. My parents married the year I arrived and didn’t live happily ever after. In two years, my father was gone. He dumped my mother and yours truly at my Sicilian grandmother’s house in Los Angeles and took off touring with his band.

My earliest memory, at age four, is plugged into my ethnicity. I was playing with the boy next door, making mud pies after a storm. He got mad because my mud pie was larger and had a better shape, so he flung some mud at me, dirtied my dress and yelled, “Go home, ‘Wop!’” Boy, that made me mad! I aimed that huge mud pie of mine and really let him have it. He ran home crying and I did the same. Swallowing my sobs, I told my mother how that brat called me a Wop. I wasn’t sure what that meant, but it didn’t matter. “I’m not a Wop, Mom,” I insisted. “I’m Sicilian.”

I eventually learned from my paternal grandparents that “Wop” was a derogatory word; it just wasn’t said. I can remember Grandfather Giaimo coming home raving because neighbors across the street had yelled, “Get out of here, Wop.” He wanted to be an American so bad. I think he’s the one who put the second “i” in our name so it would be pronounced “Jy-mo” and sound American.

I don’t remember too many good times with my Sicilian relatives. Somebody was always yelling orders at somebody else so endless upset was in the air with lots of grumbling under breaths. My grandmother was the worst of the lot. Like me, my mother couldn’t stand living with her and the feelings were mutual. My grandmother hated my mother for one simple reason: She wasn’t Italian. Grandmother Giaimo hated anybody who wasn’t Italian, but even if you were Italian it still wasn’t enough. You had to be Sicilian; if you weren’t Sicilian you weren’t really Italian, so she hated you anyway. She was Sicilian through and through.

After my parents divorced, my father had visiting rights. When I was about five-and-a-half, Mom and I were staying with the Giaimos and one day my father stopped by. He asked my mother if he could take me for a little ride and buy me some ice cream. That was the last time I saw my mother for two years! He kidnapped me and the next thing I knew I was on the road with him. My entrance to show biz!

My father worked a lot of different jobs, on cruises and some hotels, but his most steady work was in roadhouses and strip joints. After he abducted me, roadside clubs were my home until I was seven years old. A roadside club was a nightclub that was a good distance outside city limits. They usually had a dance floor and the entertainment was typically a trio or a quartet. The gigs would last three days—over a weekend—and because it was too far to drive back and forth to whatever city was nearby, the roadhouses had rooms for the musicians. That’s how we lived, moving from one roadside club to the next, each time with me upstairs in our room in the evening while Dad played downstairs.

Most times I didn’t mind being alone because I could hear the music, but now and again, having an urge to see what was happening, I’d sneak down a few steps and watch. If one of the club staff or a musician saw me I’d be carried down and plopped on top of an upright piano. Someone would say, “Sing a song, Dottie,” and I’d let loose with some dumb cute little tune like “Itty Bitty Fool” or “Three Little Fishes.” I guess that because my father was a drummer it was expected that I could sing, and it was okay with me. I had my first taste of performing and it went down easily.

I was so distracted at first with the novelty of my new lifestyle that I didn’t worry about seeing my mother. Besides, my father told me that what we were doing was all right with her: “Momma said I get to take you on a little vacation.” So, at first I didn’t question it, and, best of all, I was away from those testy Sicilians. After a couple of months, though, I really started missing my mother and wanted to see her but my father ignored my pleas. “Not yet,” he’d tell me.

We traveled by car across the country, my father at the wheel since the guys in the band were usually too drunk to drive. All that time, little did I know the anxiety my poor mother was suffering. My father never told me how long we were going to be gone, and I never dreamed that my mother didn’t know. She had the police looking for my father in state after state, but because we were constantly on the road they couldn’t find him.

After two years I was a different child. No longer the cute Shirley Temple doll that everybody adored, tweaking my cheek, I had become a gangly seven-year old. Caring for me got more awkward, especially when people asked: “What school does she go to?” Complications like that probably got my father to start thinking twice about his little girl tagging along, but what really put the brakes on was the drama that unfolded one night with me at the center of the plot.

We’d been at a roadhouse for several days with the usual arrangement: My father was working nights in the club downstairs and I was upstairs unafraid in our room because I could hear the band playing. One of those nights, while I was waiting for my father to finish his first show of the evening, some joker knocked on the door.

Now my father warned me to always keep the door locked, to never open it for anyone unless it was the owner of the place who would check every once in a while to see that I was alright. When I heard the knock I asked who it was, and when there was no reply I got confused. I mean, I couldn’t be sure it wasn’t the owner so I opened the door. It wasn’t the owner! There stood a man I’d never seen before. He said he was a friend of my Daddy’s and that Daddy had sent him because he forgot his keys. What do I know? He walked in and I sat down to watch. At first he just casually glanced around, but when he began opening drawers and rifling through Daddy’s things I got suspicious. “Daddy doesn’t like anybody going through his drawers,” I told him.

Sensing I might make a fuss, he mumbled, “I don’t have time for this,” and with his hand over my mouth, he shoved me into a clothes closet and locked the door. It didn’t take long before I got panicky, flailing my arms searching for a pull string, until it dawned on me that there was no light in that closet to turn on. In the dark I was quaking with fear, but I waited until I heard him leave before I started screaming, banging my feet on the floor and beating my fists furiously on the door. It was no use. The band was still playing and no one could hear me. I had to wait for what seemed an eternity until intermission for my dad to come up, and by then I was a wreck.

It took me a long time to get over that. Into my thirties I couldn’t sleep at night without a light on. God bless the guy who invented night lights.

The trauma I suffered was so intense it made me paranoid. I became suspicious and fearful, harboring irrational feelings that I tried to keep private. The incident disturbed my father, too. Now, whenever he left for work he was anxious about my welfare, and that took a toll on him. He got so jittery he couldn’t concentrate on performing, and because he let nothing stand between him and his music, my father returned me to my mother.

That was some homecoming. Right away I was blown away that my mom had remarried! All the time I was gone she looked for a man who would be a good father for me, and the guy she chose, Ed Jensen, owned a chicken farm in Colusa County, about forty miles from the city of Woodland. My mother thought Jensen a decent man, and at first I thought so, too. Boy, were we wrong! Jensen was a brute and before long his true colors emerged. His first move was to get rid of me. Calling me unruly, he convinced Mother that I needed the discipline of a convent school, so I was enrolled in Holy Rosary Academy in Woodland.

Although I had missed kindergarten and first grade, I tested at my age level so they put me into second grade. I stayed at the Academy until I was nine, boarding at the convent during the school week. I didn’t like it much. The nuns could be harsh; my nickname for one of them was “Iron Pants.” My attitude wasn’t helped by getting punished pretty regularly for mischief. It’s not that I was a bad kid—I never swore at any of the nuns—but I got lots of slaps on the hand for misdemeanors that, really, were more the fault of my curiosity. I remember putting a frog in a classmate’s desk to see the reaction I’d get. Of course it backfired. Another time I found a ladder in the hall outside the nun’s lounge and, since I was dying to know what was under the headpiece the nuns wore, I climbed up the ladder and peeked through the transom. I was on my knees in the chapel at play time for the next four weeks.

I wasn’t proud that my antics triggered a steady stream of reports to my mom, but there was a silver lining: The strictness of the nuns paid off for me in the classroom. I had good grades, pretty much straight “A’s” with the occasional B+, and a few years later when I went to a public junior high my GPA at the convent enabled me to skip a grade. Despite my unhappiness, I got a good education at that convent.

On weekends I went home to the chicken farm, but it was as grim as the convent. Our ramshackle house had a wooden floor that was dotted with large knot holes. One night I got into bed, stretched my legs under the covers, and my feet landed on a large snake huddled for warmth. Intuitively, I felt that episode paralleled my life: no control over lots of unwanted surprises. Thankfully, I got a temporary reprieve whenever my mother would drop me off to spend a Saturday or Sunday at my maternal Grandma Tipton’s place.

Grandma Tipton lived just outside the city of Colusa, California, on a tiny farm with a few chickens, not far from a high levee out by the watermelon patches. On a sunny day I’d walk up to the levee with my “Aunt” Mary, one of Grandma’s daughters who was only a year older than me. In the crevices of the levee were the strangest plants I had ever seen. Mary and I called them “levee pumps.” I know now they were common cattails, but back then they were mysterious flowers that stirred my imagination. Levee pumps shot up on a tall, slender stem and had a long cylindrical top, medium brown in color. They looked like a hot dog on a stick! Even though the tops were soft like velvet, they were firm enough for us to color them with crayons. The hours would fly by as I sat decorating those pumps from morning through practically the entire afternoon. When supper was ready, my mother put her two fingers between her teeth and whistled; I can still hear that high-pitched trill, that little melody calling me home.

The fun I had with Aunt Mary, away from adult supervision and transported by the exotic world of the levee, was in stark relief to the bookends of the dour convent and Jensen’s homestead. Most days I was a very glum little girl. Trying her best to cheer me up, my mother bought me a dog. We named him Spot.

SCENE TWO

Spot

Spot was a small mixed-breed dog with a lot of terrier in him. Set against his wiry white coat were two, large, dark brown spots. My mother was right: Getting that dog was a lovely distraction for me. At least for a little while.

I had Spot for a week when my stepfather, Ed Jensen, discovered that he was a chicken killer. I didn’t know it at the time, but that sealed Spot’s fate as far as Jensen was concerned. About two weeks later he made me get in the family car, holding Spot on the front seat, and the three of us headed to town. When we reached Main Street, busy with cars whizzing by, Jensen reached over, grabbed Spot, opened his door and threw my beloved dog into the traffic! I watched Spot get killed instantly. Jensen kept driving as I sat there frozen with shock. I couldn’t believe he did that! One day I had a dog that made me happy and then it was brutally taken away. I don’t think I ever felt so helpless in my life.

When the full impact hit me, I started sobbing. Sobbing over the fate of poor Spot and sobbing out of pure panic. After all, if he’d do that to my dog I might be next. Jensen was a big man, six-foot two and easily two-hundred pounds; to a little girl he was mammoth. When we got home and my mother learned what had happened she gave him hell. Jensen responded by throwing my mother against a wall and beating her up. That was my second glimpse in quick succession of who Ed Jensen really was: a violently abusive man.

Their relationship never recovered. Jensen was drunk a lot of the time, my mother would blow her top, and he would slap her around. I couldn’t stand it when the fights started so I’d run away and hide. I turned inward just like after I was locked in that roadside club clothes closet. I had to disappear in order to survive, and they were so busy fighting they never missed me.

In an effort to save their marriage, my mother and Ed decided to sell their place and move. It wasn’t doing very well anyway and my mother was tired of working that damn chicken farm. We moved from the Woodland area and got a house in Berkeley, not a particularly nice one, but it was better than what we had on the farm. The house was in a downgraded area just this side of the tracks behind a Heinz pickle factory. My mother got a job as a waitress at Woolworth’s, Jensen worked for a time in a factory as a steamfitter, and at age nine I started public school in the fourth grade at Columbus Elementary.

Not long after we moved, Ed got laid off. Bitter and angry, he drank up their income and hurt Momma an awful lot. He threw her up against walls so hard that she suffered broken ribs and a busted collarbone. Feeling desperate, I found a way to escape and music was at the heart of it.

After my father returned me to my mother he found work in San Francisco at a local strip joint called “Streets of Paris.” He rented a room at the Padre Hotel in the Tenderloin and settled in the city. When I learned he was back in the Bay area I began lobbying my mother to see him. It took my mother about three months to forgive him for leaving her and kidnapping me, but in the end she decided that he had a right to see me. I also think the hard life she was having with her second husband softened her anger at my father. So, at age nine, I began making bus trips alone to San Francisco for weekend visits with him. I would stay over on Saturday night and leave Sunday evening.

Looking back, I suppose I should be surprised that my mother approved of my “solo flights” so far from home at such a tender age, especially since so many of our relatives shook their fingers and scolded her, but I think my mother made a calculation. Considering the nightmares I was exposed to at home, she opted for me getting away despite the risks of my traveling alone.

And it’s not like my mom didn’t prep me in advance. She told me to walk fast when I got to the bus station, making it difficult for somebody to accost me. She also taught me that when I was on the bus not to let anybody, and certainly no strangers, approach me and insinuate themselves with lines like, “Hi, little girl.” To prevent that from happening, I made a beeline to a window seat on the bus and glued myself to it, looking out. Although I followed my mother’s advice, I was, of course, wonderfully oblivious to the dangers, and, in a way, that was a good thing. I could focus my full attention on the education in life and music my father was giving me.

Father was a charmer, to say the least. Five-foot-ten inches tall, trim and handsome, he had dark, curly hair with a slight widow’s peak and gray on the sides. Twinkling eyes, a good-looking Sicilian nose, and a devastating smile completed the picture. Dad was a very fastidious man, in his dress and his habits. His hotel room was spotless; shoes lined up in his wardrobe closet; magazines evenly stacked, including back issues of Vargas Pin-Ups; pens and pencils in his desk drawers arranged in orderly file. He smoked a pipe in the daytime and allowed himself one cigar after dinner. He wasn’t a big drinker, but each night before dinner he raised a glass of his own concoction. Called a “Passion Drink,” he made it with brandy in a sweet vermouth float topped by a cherry.

The bus ride from Berkeley across the bay took about thirty minutes. Most times I’d take a Saturday afternoon bus and arrive in the City before my father went to work. He’d meet me at the station, we’d grab a taxi to the Tenderloin, and taking my hand we’d ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Prefatory Notes
• Introduction
• Part I. The California Years
• Part II. The New York and East Coast Years
• Part III. California Redux
• Postscript
• Notes
• Selected Discography
• Index
• Illustrations
• Back Cover