the rix mix

A renaissance woman. Bookseller, publisher, columnist, historian, graphics designer, teacher, concert producer, friend to poets, author of a feminist essay,"The Liberation of the Yiddishe Mama."

Rosetta Reitz, Champion of Jazz Women, Dies at 84
By Douglas Martin
Published: November 14, 2008, New York Times

Rosetta Reitz, an ardent feminist who scavenged through the early history of jazz and the blues to resurrect the music of long-forgotten women and to create a record label dedicated to them, died on Nov. 1 in Manhattan. She was 84.

Ms. Reitz (pronounced rights) came by her interest in jazz through her husband and male friends, but as the feminist movement gathered steam in the 1960s, she noticed something was missing: the music’s women. So she started collecting old 78s of performers like the trumpeter Valaida Snow, the pianist-singer Georgia White and a bevy of blues singers who had faded from memory.

At the same time, she unearthed lost songs by more famous artists like Bessie Smith, Ida Cox and Ma Rainey.
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Ms. Reitz started Rosetta Records in 1979 with $10,000 she had borrowed from friends. Her routine was to scout out lost music, usually through record collectors. She then supervised the remastering of records that were often severely damaged; researched and wrote detailed liner notes; and designed graphics and found period photographs for the album covers. She personally wrapped each order and took it to the post office for shipment. (Around a dozen stores later carried the Rosetta label.)

“In that decade of the 1920s, when jazz was really being formulated and changing from an entertainment music to an art form,” Ms. Reitz said in an interview with The New York Times in 1980, “these women were extraordinarily important and instrumental in accomplishing that.”

My Greenwich Village poetry mentor, Joel Oppenheimer, probably knew Rosetta before he converted to feminism, & probably didn't get along with her.

Labels: music, obituary