The Lady Swings: Memoirs of a Jazz Drummer
Dottie Dodgion and Wayne Enstice
264 Pages
ISBN: #9780252085512
University of Illinois Press
2021

Dottie Dodgion isn't reluctant to share the trials and tribulations endured throughout a long life. Dodgion was raped by her stepfather at age ten, afflicted with early stage polio as a teenager, endured physical, sexual, and emotional abuse at the hands of men in intimate relationships, suffered a back-alley abortion, and repeatedly encountered all manner of sexism on and off the bandstand. While these ordeals and many others are integrated into an account of her decades as a struggling jazz musician, she is not asking for sympathy, she is not trying to make refined points about sexual politics, nor is she looking to settle old scores. In The Lady Swings: Memoirs of a Jazz Drummer, Dodgion casts herself as an irrepressible spirit and a striver, putting the hardships into perspective by emphasizing her devotion to the music, expounding on the gradual evolution of her artistry, and celebrating the highs of making music with musicians ranging from jazz royalty to figures who don't appear in the music's history texts.

Dodgion's jazz education began in childhood, prior to World War II. Far removed from the conventions of school bands and private music studies, a wealth of experiential learning took place in strip clubs as well as at record listening sessions in motel rooms, courtesy of her father, an accomplished jazz drummer. Years before she picked-up a pair of sticks, Dodgion "absorbed a certain amount of rhythm from him" during rehearsals and shows. Sitting beside him on the bandstand, she could see how he got a certain sound on the kit, and gradually began to understand the logic of what he played.

Father and daughter often stayed up until the early hours of the morning, listening to records by