The way that Bohle and many other white female jazz artists set up their shows was telling. All-male swing bands rarely, if ever, played anything classical unless it was a fully jazzed-up version. But for the ladies, a straight classical piece was necessary due to racial/sexual politics. Classical was seen as high art of great delicacy and beauty and white women of that era were seen as a product of this European art sensibility—they too must be delicate and beautiful. She could be a great musician but she must play classical. To play jazz, especially straight black jazz rather than the watered-down white jazz, was to tread dangerous waters. A white man could play jazz, you understand, because he could not be corrupted by the sensuous black rhythms and forget his whiteness but a white woman is a different story. She might well be tempted into sexual promiscuity with the implicit fear that she might even start to desire black men. So Laura Bohle would start off her show playing straight classical only to then dip into jazz. She got away with it because she was playing for soldiers starved for anything that reminded them of home but who otherwise might not have been so enamored with her talent.
This photo of the great jazz singer, trumpeter, bandleader and inventor of the B-collar shirt, Billy Eckstine, caused some consternation when it was first published in
Life magazine. Although it was only intended to show how the ladies loved Billy—the very epitome of tall, dark and handsome—many whites were upset that it showed how the
white ladies loved Billy. In every sense, white women were as oppressed and restricted as black people. They had to watch everything they said and did or face social criticism that could ruin them. White women were jailed simply accepting help from a black man. It seems ridiculous to us today but it was very real in the 40s and lasted through the 60s.