By many measures, Dottie Dodgion was an abused child. Her father kidnapped her at age 7 and hurried across one state after another. The police were alerted but didn’t catch them. This was the 1950s—dad was a jazz drummer racing from show to show and although she claims she “never thought seriously about playing drums” as a kid, later in that same paragraph she concedes, “I must have absorbed a certain amount of rhythm from him. The rhythm was in my ears and recorded in my head.”
Written in chatty style, The Lady Swings is her account of a life interestingly spent. Women are still relatively scarce behind the drum kit even today and she was certainly an anomaly when she surfaced in the ‘60s New York jazz scene. Her gender was noticed, and derided, but the jazz cats heard that she could play. Before long, Dodgion gigged with everyone from Charles Mingus to Benny Goodman.
Most of her efforts went unrecorded or unreleased but—starting in the ‘90s—Dodgion enjoyed a late career surge with albums under her own name.
