JAZZ : Ladies Sing the Blues : Rosetta Reitz single-handedly runs the only label devoted to keeping alive rare jazz and blues recordings by female artists

She has been a stockbroker, owned a bookstore and a greeting-cards business, written a food column for the Village Voice and authored a best-selling book on menopause. But at 67, Rosetta Reitz has finally settled on her true calling. She is the owner of Rosetta Records, the only recording label exclusively devoted to keeping alive rare jazz and blues by female artists.

Reitz runs this one-woman operation from the high-ceilinged, 1930s apartment where she lives by herself in New York City’s Chelsea district. Hardwood floors are covered with Oriental rugs and one living room wall is lined with shelves holding hundreds of albums and books. Just inside her door are photos of many of the artists on Rosetta.

Since she started the label in 1979 with $10,000 she borrowed from friends, Reitz has built a catalogue of 19 titles--about half of them compilations--that she sells by mail order. While she won’t give overall sales figures, Reitz says that her four “Independent Women’s Blues” albums have sold more than 20,000 copies.

Her catalogue includes blues and jazz divas Ida Cox, Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith, who all made handsome livings off their blues, as well as collections by such other well-known artists such as Dinah Washington, Ethel Waters and even Mae West. But Reitz has also revived the work of dozens of lesser-knowns who never enjoyed much recognition or financial prosperity, including Martha Copeland, Bessie Brown, Maggie Jones and Bertha Idaho.

Most were singers, but the catalogue also offers Dorothy Donegan, Helen Humes and other pianists, along with an album by the International Sweethearts of Rhythm, an all-female jazz band from the 1940s.

There was never a shortage of female musicians, according to Reitz.

“Women were always there,” she says. “Lester Young, as a young man traveling with a young family band, learned to play saxophone from his sister Irma. Cab Calloway, whose sister was older and already a successful trooper, taught him all that ‘Hi-De-Hi’ and ‘Hi-De-Ho’ stuff. It’s just that they were considered unimportant, not worthy of mention.”

It’s admirable enough that Reitz is making available so much rare music by women. But she says her mission extends well beyond releasing good music by talented female players. She wants to showcase women who expressed self-assured, independent attitudes about their place in the world.

“While I was writing my book on menopause, I was listening to the blueswomen,” Reitz says, recalling how the label idea germinated during the late 1970s. “I was so alone and needed to be nurtured, and I found I was getting it from them.”

When Reitz tuned into the lyrics on rare blues 78s she had collected since the 1960s, she was blown away. She discovered bawdy but brainy women who weren’t afraid to assert themselves, to ask for exactly what they wanted. It didn’t matter to her that what they wanted was often sexual, or that they found their power in their sexuality. The point was that they were in control, calling the shots, not meekly obeying some man’s orders.

“I found my women singing, ‘I bake the best jelly roll in town, I got the sweetest cabbage.’ Well, those are not victims, women speaking like that,” Reitz says. “And I discovered this whole area of the blues where women were full of self-esteem. It’s in a class, as far as I’m concerned, with Emily Dickinson when Ma Rainey sings, ‘If you don’t like my ocean/Don’t fish in my sea/Stay out of my valley/Let my mountain be.’ ”

Reitz has produced her recordings mostly by re-mastering the old 78s. Initially, her releases were primarily on vinyl or cassettes, but she is gradually moving toward CDs. Much of her material is drawn from the “race records” of the 1920s and 1930s, music by black artists that was released by major labels such as Columbia and Decca on their black-artist subsidiaries, marketed exclusively to black listeners.

Although Rosetta’s collections span from the 1920s through the 1960s, Reitz is especially fond of the 1920s. “This was a very special period, the only period when a group of women had power,” she says. “These blues queens of the ‘20s (Cox, Rainey, Smith) who all made handsome livings off their music were very successful. They hired musicians, they hired dancers, they were the women in charge. They had real estate, fur coats, fancy satin and velvet dresses, jewelry, Cadillacs.”

Reitz is a veritable encyclopedia of history on the music she loves. She writes the liner notes for all of her releases, and most of these musicians have never been treated with such insight and dignity. The notes she penned for Donegan’s “Dorothy Romps” (released last year) capture the essence of a brilliant pianist whom critics are starting to compare favorably with Erroll Garner, Earl Hines and other greats.

Donegan, the only living artist with a recording on Rosetta, met Reitz when she produced an all-women’s jazz concert at Carnegie Hall in 1981 and invited Donegan to appear.

“She is brave,” Donegan says. “She put her money where her mouth was. She’s helped women who would have gone unrecognized. She helped me, she brought back things I had done during the 1950s that would have been lost. I don’t listen to (her label’s) music every day, but I’m glad it’s being unearthed. She’s sort of like an archeologist.”

Reitz is in demand as an authority on women’s jazz and blues. She lectures at colleges across the country including the New School for Social Research in New York. Her “Mean Mothers” blues series has been adopted as a “text” by music and women’s studies classes on various campuses.

And she has been hired as a consultant on a film project titled “The International Sweethearts of Rhythm,” a story about the all-women’s, ‘40s jazz band. Producers Joel Castleberg and Rob Newman got the idea for the movie after reading an article about Reitz in the Wall Street Journal. A script is being written by Dianne Houston, a black playwright from New York. Castleberg and Newman are developing the project in collaboration with Los Angeles-based De Passe Entertainment. (De Passe CEO Suzanne De Passe co-wrote the script for “Lady Sings the Blues” and served as executive producer on the “Lonesome Dove” television miniseries.)

It seems unlikely that Reitz, who is Jewish and white and grew up in Utica, a mill town in Upstate New York, should be so drawn to the artists on her label, who are mostly black. But she was introduced to jazz and blues early on by the men in her life, the irony of ironies for this devout feminist.

“Young women today wouldn’t believe that women in the 1940s didn’t pick their own music,” she says. “The men did. Music was their domain. I had one boyfriend that was an Ellington buff, one that was a Fats Waller buff, it was just part of life, part of the courtship, so I became interested, and I just never lost my interest.”

And after 13 years as head of Rosetta Records, her interest continues. She says she has enough good material for at least 22 more CDs. At some point in the not-too-distant future, though, she hopes her company will become obsolete as female musicians no longer need her advocacy in order to be heard.

“The situation has improved, it definitely has improved,” she says. “I just hope that women will be so commonly working that no fuss will have to be made about it. My hope and dream is that there won’t be a need for a women’s record company.”