September 4, 2020
Hello ,
Huge thanks to subscriber Amber K. for tipping me off about the International Sweethearts Of Rhythm.
You are gonna love these girls!
The Sweethearts were an all-girl, racially-integrated band. They played swing and jazz at a time when
female trombonists, trumpet players and drummers rarely got a place on the stage.
In segregated 1940's America, these girls grabbed their future in their own hands and ran away with it.
Literally.
"We felt like fugitives that night."
From Fugitives to Famous!
Saxophonist Helen Saine Coston remembered 70-years later, how the girls stole a bus and took off on their own, becoming so talented and famous they played back-up for Ella Fitzgerald.
Helen had taken some piano lessons as a child in Tennessee, but it was on her school's basketball court that she caught the eye of Laurence C. Jones.
Jones had founded Piney Woods School near Jackson, Mississippi in 1910, a boarding school to train black and multi-racial students in the trades. Girls learned sewing and cooking, and some of them learned music.
In 1938, Jones formed the Sweethearts to raise funds for the school, in which many of the students were orphans. The group traveled to nearby towns in Mississippi, by the following year, the band had proven so successful they toured towns in Louisiana, Alabama and Tennessee.
Jones invited Helen to Piney Woods after seeing her play basketball. After touring the school she begged her parents to let her go. She left home at fourteen and began clarinet lessons at Piney Woods.
“I learned the clarinet fairly well, good enough to play in the marching band. Then I branched over to the saxophone. What I had in the back of my mind the whole time was learning to play well enough to join the Sweethearts," Helen said.
Jones billed the band as "international" as the group included a Chinese-black saxophonist, a Mexican-black drummer and a Hawaiian trumpet player. He selected some members for their musical ability and some for their exotic looks.
Below: Willie Mae Li. Jones changed her last name Li to Wong for affect.
Within a year, a seat opened in the band for a baritone sax and Helen saw her chance. She traded alto for baritone and six months later joined the band.
In those early years, we were “a raggedy group of children” remembers Helen Saine Coston. "After we turned professional, then we got ourselves fixed up. We became a lot more sophisticated.”
The Sweethearts signed with a booking agent and took to the road, playing a schedule of 12-14 stops in as little as16 days.
The band made a name for itself, playing Des Moines, Omaha, Kansas City, Detroit and Chicago and every little town in between. There was money to be made in the big band era, but little trickled down to the Sweethearts.
The girls traveled with a chaperone hired by Piney Woods School who kept charge of the finances. Each musician was paid eight dollars a week. The cost of food and other necessities cost them up to seven dollars a week.
Payment from the venues went to the agent, who took a percentage, and the band remained a fund-raising venture for Piney Woods School, sending Jones $3000 a month.
The death of one of the band members changed the tune. It prompted the school to take out life insurance on the musicians and named Piney Woods
beneficiary.
The girls disagreed. By now, they'd gained a measure of independence and confidence unusual for young women of the time. Several were of the age to graduate from high school, and when Jones said they have to leave the band and come back to school to earn their diplomas, they refused.
“So, you know, being young and adventurous, you can see how we happened to decide to leave. We left under protest, so to speak," Helen said. "One night after we finished a dance, we just took off."
The major black newspaper, The Afro-American reported on May 3, 1941,
“Eighteen girls of the Piney Woods School band quit the school, took the school bus and pursued by highway police, fled through seven states to Washington and freedom.”
Helen Coston explained, "We had been playing big cities and getting away from the Mississippi surroundings. We were seeing the world for the first time and beginning to understand some of the possibilities that might exist for us."
The chaperone was fired for going along. She helped the girls find a place to live in Arlington, Virginia. They returned the school bus, uniforms and instruments. But the head of Piney Woods
Laurence C. Jones, reported the girls who were underage to the local welfare agency.
“I was the youngest one," Helen said. "I was 15, so I had to go back home and stay there until I was 16.
By the time Helen returned to the band, the members no longer looked, nor sounded like school girls.
Under new management, the Sweethearts proved themselves to crowds from Seattle to Omaha and
New Britain, Connecticut. That's where a white alto sax player joined the band in 1943, Jewish teenager Rosalind Cron.
Below: the Sax Section stands to entertain the crowd. Vi Burnside, unknown, Roz Cron, Helen Saine, unknown.
A white trombonist, Toby Butler had first integrated the Sweethearts earlier that year. Suddenly, troubles began in their travels south of the Mason-Dixon line.
"I would either know, understand and learn how to live as a black girl, or I could go home," Rosalind realized. "Everybody knew this was dangerous territory."
The Sweethearts slept on the bus due to segregated hotels and motels. They passed through small towns with the
shades of the bus pulled down, and relied on their white driver them take-out.
Jim Crow laws forbid Rosalind and Toby to take the stage with their black band
mates, so they wore dark make-up to disguise their white skin. Their mothers were black. That was the story they told when sheriffs came around.
“Once Roz [Cron] told a sheriff that," remembered trumpeter Tiny Davis,
"but he went through her purse and there was a photograph of her parents sitting in front of their New England picket fence, so, I think, she got hauled off to jail.” Roz Cron was also arrested once for walking with a black soldier in uniform.
At a stop in Beaufort, South Carolina, a local black woman met the bus and took Roz home with her to stay the night. "I wonder at her courage. If any from the other side of Beaufort had witnessed her welcoming hug to me, her house would be set on fire tonight," Roz thought. "I don’t think we understand this kind of courage up north."
The Sweethearts of Rhythm remained invisible to most of white America, but they played the biggest clubs on the black circuit, taking the same stage as musicians like Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington and Count Baise,
The all-woman band played the Apollo in New York, the Howard in Washington D.C. and the Regal in Chicago. After a performance in Chicago in 1943, the Chicago Defender announced the band was "one of the hottest stage shows that ever raised the roof of the theater!"
While raising the roof, they also filled the house. They played three shows a night at the Rhumboogie Club in Chicago, and crowds were still turned away. In New York at the Apollo, they played up to seven shows a day. They jammed with Louis Armstrong, Billie Holliday and Ella Fitzgerald, and cut four records for RCA Victor and Guild Records.
Along the way, they proved themselves to men who didn't believe women had the power to blow a horn. "You’d say it was an all-girls band and men would say, oh no,” remembered Tiny Davis.(shown below)
"Me?" said Tiny, "Oh, I had more chops than most men. I had lots of juice, too. I could boop and sell it...So no, we never got the credit we deserved. But women have a hard time in anything. There’s nothing you can do. Just keep on keeping on.”
The Sweethearts kept on just fine. Those poor orphan girls now had seven different formal dresses with matching pairs of shoes.
Ernestine "Tiny" Davis auditioned to join the group in 1941. She became the oldest and only married member, later taking a short leave to have her third child.
Tiny's huge personality brought a touch of comedy to the show, as well as her 245 pounds of solid jive and rhythm, a voice like Louis Armstrong and a trumpet sound second only to Gabriel himself.
In 1945, the Sweethearts made history as the first black women to perform with the USO. Black soldiers overseas staged a letter-writing campaign that lead to a six-month European tour for the band. They played in England and France to strictly segregated audiences and were featured on an Armed Forces Radio broadcasts of a show directed at African-American soldiers.
In 1946, the International Sweethearts of Rhythm began to break up. Some wanted to marry. Others started smaller musical combos, and the prevailing forces were against them. Music was changing. Men coming home from the war crowded the scene. And the money that should have been theirs had continued to line other pockets.
We are re-writing the history to include stories of young women like the Sweethearts. The courage and accomplishments of these young musicians remain a testament to girl-power.
Sources
Thanks to Angelica for sending me a link to this podcast 99PercentInvisable.org. Last week it featured an episode called The Revolutionary Post about the origins of the U.S. Post office, which I found to be extremely interesting!
The post office has been important to our democracy since the beginning, and it is no less important now. I learned a lot I didn't know about how the post office started, how it changed over the years, and when and why home mail delivery began.
According to the publisher the book is a masterful history of a long underappreciated institution, How the Post Office Created America examines the surprising role of the postal service in our nation’s political, social, economic, and physical development.
With the celebration of the 75th Anniversary of the end of WWII and #BlackLivesMatter taking center stage, the media is finally recognizing the African-American women who served during the war.
NPR recently interviewed with one of the last remaining members of the #6888 Postal Battalion,
Since last year there has been a push to award the #6888 a Congressional Gold Medal. Bills have been proposed in both the House and Senate.
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