Through Danny Barker, Shipton is introduced to trumpeter Buck Clayton, beginning a friendship that ultimately leads to Shipton inheriting some of Clayton's music and forming a band in his memory. But Clayton prompts Shipton into writing and researching a book about Fats Waller. Shipton meets as many Waller band survivors as possible, including guitarist Al Casey (with whom he tours in the UK), trumpeters Jabbo Smith and Bill Coleman, saxophonist Franz Jackson, and significantly, drummer Harry Dial. This chapter gives background to Shipton's book on Waller, and brings alive the era of 1930s New York and of swing bands on the road.

Chapter 7, ‘Most of My Sheroes Don’t Appear on a Stamp: Contextualising the Contributions of Women Musicians to the Progression of Jazz’, considers the vital part that women – both vocalists and instrumentalists – made to the development of jazz, although they have tended to be excluded from standard historiographical narratives of the genre. With a focus on the development of jazz in the United States, Tammy L. Kernodle considers women jazz musicians’ work from the early days of New Orleans jazz, through jazz in Chicago, New York, Kansas City, and Europe, to the emergence of women jazz singers, including Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald, and to the all-girl swing bands of the 1940s.

This chapter provides an overview of the role of jazz during the period, noting the genre’s beginnings in African music patterns and its migration to unexpected areas such as Chicago and California. The chapter also briefly profiles major musicians and singers associated with jazz during the mid-twentieth century.