Rosetta Reitz

Happy Birthday, Rosetta Reitz...September 28, 1924-November 1, 2008...Without the tireless, diligent work of Rosetta Reitz, much of the music and history of many female jazz artists would be lost to us. Throughout her lifetime Reitz enjoyed a varied career which included working as a stockbroker, a food columnist for the Village Voice, a college professor, owning a greeting card company and the Four Seasons bookstore and writing a groundbreaking book on women's menopause. She was an outspoken feminist and the co-founder of the Older Women's Liberation (OWL). She also founded Rosetta Records which focused on the female recording artists who had been forgotten and ignored by mainstream labels.

Reitz's introduction to jazz was through her ex-husband and other male friends but over time she began to realize that women's music was missing from what she was listening to. She began collecting old 78 recordings of musicians like trumpeter and vocalist Valaida Snow, pianist and singer Georgia White and a host of forgotten blues singers. She also discovered many lost recordings by better known performers including Ida Cox, Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey and Mae West. Her collection covered music from the 1920's to the 1960's with an emphasis on the music of the Blues Queens of the 20's.

Reitz was quoted in the 1980's, "In that decade in the 1920's, when jazz was really being formulated and changing from an entertainment music into an art form, these women were extraordinarily important and instrumental in accomplishing that. Louis Armstrong was a sideman on records in the '20's with singers like Sippie Wallace, Eva Taylor, Hociel Thomas, Virginia Liston and Margaret Johnson. These women's records were made as their records, but when they come out now they are reissued as Louis Armstrong records, when actually he's not that important on them."

"These women had the power. They hired the musicians and the chorus line, a lot of them wrote the music themselves and they produced their own shows. They were more than just singers; they were symbols of success."

With $10,000 she borrowed from friends, Reitz founded Rosetta Records in 1979. Most of the music she released was already in the public domain but she made a point of tracking down the rights to some of the songs and paying royalties to the artists when she could. She supervised the remastering of the often damaged original records, researched the backgrounds of the artists, wrote the liner notes, designed the album graphics and found vintage photographs for the albums. Originally sold through mail order, the label was eventually picked up by several record stores. As recording technology progressed, the albums were converted to tapes and then CD's. Reitz released 17 compilations of vintage jazz and blues, most of them centered around a theme but she also recorded retrospectives of The International Sweethearts of Rhythm, Valaida Snow and Mae West.

In 1980 and 1981, Reitz produced a tribute to "Women of Jazz"  at Avery Fisher Hall as part of the Newport Jazz Festival. It was called "The Blues is a Woman" and featured Adelaide Hall, Big Mama Thornton, Nell Carter and Koko Taylor with narration by Carmen McRae. She also lobbied for a postage stamp in Bessie Smith's honor. Reitz planned to release 26 albums and write a book on women in jazz but she died at the age of 84 of heart disease before she could fully realize her dream. Her albums have not been reissued but renewed interest in many of the artists Rietz promoted have been re-discovered by the greater recording industry.