Jean Barnett Stearns, also published as Jean Stearns

Jean Barnett Stearns was a jazz-dance historian and writer whose co-authored work reshaped how American vernacular dance is understood and documented. Born in 1922 in White Hall, Illinois, Stearns grew up in a musical household and earned a degree in English from the University of Illinois in 1945. Her training was literary rather in the conservatory tradition, a foundation that served her later work as a researcher and archivist rather than a performing artist.

In 1956, Stearns married jazz scholar Marshall Winslow Stearns, who had founded the Institute of Jazz Studies and was assembling a comprehensive history of American vernacular dance through interviews, demonstrations, film screenings, and direct relationships with performers. Jean became his research and writing collaborator, helping organize a vast collection of oral testimony, visual documentation, and printed sources. When Marshall died in 1966, the manuscript remained unfinished. Jean completed it, and Macmillan published *Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance* under both their names in 1968, with publisher and archive records explicitly crediting her as co-author.

The book traced connections among African diasporic movement, minstrelsy, vaudeville, social jazz dance, tap, theatrical forms, and individual artists. Its interviews and performer-centered accounts provided later dancers with a documentary foundation at a time when many Black vernacular contributions were systematically excluded from academic dance histories. The volume remained in circulation through subsequent editions, including a 1979 printing and a widely used 1994 reprint from Da Capo Press.

The work also reflects the limitations of its era and authors' positions. Later Black dance scholars have revised terminology, challenged genealogical frameworks, and expanded whose voices are represented in the historical record. Stearns's significance therefore lies both in what she and Marshall preserved and in the critical conversations the book continues to generate among dancers and historians today.