Gene Smith is often portrayed as a classic midcentury male artist-egotist, and not without reason. But there was something selfless about his work in the loft building at 821 Sixth Avenue, especially his tapes; there was nothing he could have done with that material, no practical outlet, and as a manner for expunging his passions the activity of recording sound went against his well-known craft. In other words, his ego doesn’t seem to have motivated his audio work, which spurred me to reach out in disparate directions far beyond his photographs.
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One of the loft’s original tenants, in 1954, at the beginning of the “jazz loft” era of the building, was the photographer Harold Feinstein, longtime friend and assistant of Smith’s. He shared a wall on the fourth floor with the revered Juilliard teacher Hall Overton, who gave private lessons in his loft on side-by-side upright pianos. In 1955, the pianist Dorrie Glenn moved in with Feinstein and in 1956 she became pregnant. Facing loft conditions not suitable for a newborn, Dorrie and Harold moved out the next year, and Smith moved in, taking their half of the fourth floor next to Overton, facing the street.
Before Dorrie and Harold left, they threw one last dinner party in the loft, and the writer Anaïs Nin attended. Later she captured the scene in her diaries:
Last night dinner at Harold Feinstein’s. A long loft room, all across one floor, floor uneven with holes. Harold tall and round-faced showing his work. His wife pale and blond, pregnant. In the front of the room all his photographic equipment. In the middle of the room, a double bed. In the back a stove, a table, an icebox. The dispossessed life of the bohemians I knew in Paris. The talk was rich. On the floor above him, live jazz musicians. That night crystallized my vision of jazz music linked to a way of life, another vision of life. It has passed into the bloodstream and separated people from material ambition. It is the only rebellion against conformity, automatism, commerce, middle-class values and death of the spirit. It all made a synthesis, Really the Blues, and Solo, and The Man with the Golden Arm, and The Wild Party. The only poetry in America, the only passion. I am not speaking of delinquency, or the lower depths of Nelson Algren, but a poetry, a heightened state, a search for ecstasy, the equivalent of surrealism. And the equivalent of jazz in writing.
Why not pay attention to the artists who humanize, keep the sources of feeling alive, keep us alive?
In October 2010, I met the seventy-six-year-old Dorrie Glenn Woodson in New York. I mentioned Nin’s diary passage to her, and she responded with wry chagrin:
Nin relegated me to pale blond pregnant wife status. She’s talking about jazz in our loft all night, and I’m a working jazz pianist and she totally tuned me out of the conversation. In her mind, the jazz musicians were the men upstairs. It wasn’t just the men who made it difficult for women, it was the whole culture of the times, and Nin was no different in my brief experience with her. She was probably an important role model for many women, in that she lived her beliefs and pursued and realized her dreams. Jeez, now that I said that, isn’t that enough? I shouldn’t be so hard on her. It’s just that personally she had never entered my mind as being a feminist. I was living a very conflicted, difficult existence, trying to be a jazz musician, and I didn’t see Anaïs doing anything that helped open any doors for me or other women at the time. She did help herself, though, and maybe that was enough.
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When I met Woodson she had naturally gray hair that was long and free-flowing, parted down the middle and framing her glasses in the style of Gloria Steinem. She was born Dorothy Meese in 1934 on a small farm in rural Pennsylvania near the Mason-Dixon Line; her father farmed fruits and vegetables and peddled them in nearby towns, and her deeply religious mother practiced the dawn-to-dusk farm traditions with dedication and care. The Dorrie Woodson I met was a long way from the farm.
Young Dorothy displayed a touch and dexterity on piano beyond her years. The radio brought Ella Fitzgerald, Nat Cole, and Duke Ellington into her home in a nearly all-white region. She was transfixed. Her dreams of being a professional jazz pianist grew more potent. In 1952, after a talent show in Salisbury, Pennsylvania, eighteen-year-old Dorothy met an African-American bassist and singer in the Herb Jeffries vein. He was from Frostburg, Maryland, and twenty years her senior. They began a long-term relationship, in secret. She gained confidence in her ability to make impressions musically and to generate opportunities for herself. Things seemed hopeful. But she’d grown up without anyone uttering a word of sex education—and birth control was still illegal, and often unreliable.
I became pregnant in Hagerstown, Maryland, and I was taken in by a Catholic agency that placed me in a private family home. Then they placed me in a home for unwed mothers. I was totally drugged out during childbirth. This was February 1955. I nursed my baby girl for six weeks, but gave her up for adoption because I had my eye on New York City. Actually I’d had my eye on New York since I was thirteen years old. I knew I couldn’t manage both music and motherhood. If there’d been decent birth control during this time I wouldn’t have had this decision to make. It would be difficult for a man to understand how hard this was. I decided to go for my music. Around this time I met a saxophonist and I liked his last name, so I adopted it. I also changed my first name to Dorrie. I became Dorrie Glenn.
By April 1955 Dorrie was living in Baltimore, working a day job and playing piano at the YWCA at night. The vibraphonist Teddy Charles passed through town with a band booked at the club Dorrie went to every Sunday night. She met Teddy there, and he encouraged her to move to New York. He told her about the loft building at 821 Sixth Avenue where an after-hours jazz scene was developing. A month later, Dorrie arrived at the Port Authority bus terminal, dropped her bags at the local YWCA, and found her way to the flower-district loft building. There she met Harold Feinstein, who lived on the fourth floor, and soon the two were married.
The period from 1955 to 1957 in that loft were two of the most carefree years of my life. My music was in good shape; my music was cared for. I was gigging in the Village, and I went on a well-paying tour around New England with the Sheraton Hotel chain. Then, in late 1956, I became pregnant with our daughter and we moved out of the loft. I gave birth to our daughter in 1957. I enjoyed mothering and I gradually returned to work at local clubs. Harold was working on his photography and in 1959 he got a job teaching at the University of Pennsylvania, so we moved to Philadelphia. We decided to split up although I was pregnant with our second child. I moved into my own apartment. Our son was born in 1960, and I had both children living with me. That’s when the real nightmare began. My gigs were at night, you know, beginning at nine p.m. or ten p.m. So I’d get home at two a.m. or three a.m., and then the babies would be up at dawn. I started having hallucinations from lack of sleep. So Harold and I decided to move closer to each other so parental responsibilities could be shared more easily.
There was unshakable tension between motherhood and developing what I wanted to do most in my life—something that started at a very early age for me—and that was playing music. There must be many women out there whose dreams were squelched or seriously deferred by motherhood. There must be many women out there who spent much of their lives enduring and recovering from unwanted pregnancies. But you rarely hear those stories. Or I don’t hear them, do you? It’s considered unmotherly or immoral for women to be honest and tell those stories. It has nothing to do with loving your kids or not. I loved mine and I feel like I was a good mother. I’m still close with them today. But it’s just a trade-off men don’t have to make.
In the early 1960s I began to have some new relationships, and I had two accidental pregnancies that ended in illegal abortions, which were done by a doctor who was an excellent doctor and wanted to help women. I mean, truly, that was his mission. He was a saint. But there was one night I was working at a club after one of the abortions. I thought I was fine and I was back at work. It was a dark club like they all were. I was playing piano and for whatever reason I started bleeding. Before I knew what was going on there was blood all over the back of my dress. I didn’t know whether to acknowledge what was happening or just get out of there. I didn’t know what to do. There was blood all over the piano seat. I ended up in the hospital where they threatened to not treat me unless I revealed the name of the doctor who had done the abortion. It was terrifying. I never told them the name of the doctor. Eventually, they treated me. In 1963 I was introduced to the pill and that put an end to my life of ignorance and conflict up until that point.
I mentioned to Woodson that I had documented nearly a thousand people as being part of the loft scene at 821 Sixth Avenue and fewer than a dozen of them were female musicians. Woodson shook her head knowingly.
There are so many stories about what it was like for a female jazz musician back then. It’s not just that men didn’t want to play with women. The problems were more complex than that. I used to play piano at all kinds of joints, a whole spectrum of joints. At some of these joints it was part of my job to go to the bar in between sets so men would come up to me and buy drinks for me. I was supposed to play good piano and then go to the bar and sell drinks. Can you believe that? I was never much of a drinker, so I’d have six glasses of full drinks lined up behind the piano at the end of a night.
Dorrie later met and married Bill Woodson, a bass player. For forty years she has lived in San Antonio and was active on the jazz scene there until 2007 when she contracted chronic fatigue syndrome. I asked her if she’d ever considered writing about her life. She responded with a comment that reminded me of something Nabokov once wrote about losing a memory after employing it in one of his books:
I’ve been encouraged by several people to write a book, but I don’t want to. Sometimes when something happens and it is so outstanding and you tell people about it, your memory of the original story dims. It becomes a memory of a memory. I don’t want that to happen to me.