Striving to express the lived experience of women's music at The Club,
Stacy Holman Jones has created a text that is itself performative, and
the reader cannot resist playing a starring role. Her evocative
narrative slips in and out of prose, dialogue, and poetry. Fieldnotes
and song lyrics are staged as inseparable parts of the events of social
meaning occurring between ethnographer and field site, between reader
and text. Jones is haunted by the specters of reliability and validity,
motivated by the goals of multivocality and multiple truths, and driven
by the music. She is also driven by the mystery and complexity of
women's music; a category which is impossible to capture, tame, or pin
down. Created and recreated from many points of view in each performance
and evocation, it resists a stable definition. This innovative
ethnography is an important move toward turning the postmodern critique
into a lyrical and complex expression of social experience.