International Sweethearts of Rhythm

The International Sweethearts of Rhythm was the first integrated all women's band in the United States. During the 1940s the band featured some of the best female musicians of the day. They played swing and jazz on a national circuit that included the Apollo Theater in New York City, the Regal Theater in Chicago, and the Howard Theater in Washington, DC. 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!" More recently, they have been labeled "the most prominent and probably best female aggregation of the Big Band era". During feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s in America, the International Sweethearts of Rhythm regained a significant amount of popularity, particularly with feminist writers and musicologists who have made it their goal to change the discourse on the history of jazz to equally include both men and women musicians. Antionette Handy, flutist, was one scholar who documented the story of these female musicians of color.

History

Early years
The original members of the band had met at Piney Woods Country Life School, a school for poor and African American children, in Mississippi in 1938. The majority who attended Piney Woods were orphaned children, including band member Helen Jones, who had been adopted by the school's principal and founder (also the Sweethearts' original bandleader), Dr. Laurence C. Jones. During a 1980 Kansas City Women's Jazz Festival interview, band member Helen Jones explains that the very existence of International Sweethearts of Rhythm was the direct result of Dr. Jones's vision, who in the 1930s had been inspired by Ina Ray Hutton's Melodears to create an all-female jazz band at Piney Woods. Always having been an entrepreneur when it came to fundraising, in the early 1920s, Dr. Jones supported the school by sending an all-female vocal group called the Cotton Blossom Singers on the road. Following the fundraising successes of the all-female vocal group and several other Piney Woods musical groups, in 1937 he formed the Swinging Rays of Rhythm, an all-female band led by Consuela Carter. The band toured extensively throughout the East raising money for the school. According to the group's saxophonist and bandleader, Lou Holloway, the Swinging Rays of Rhythm took over as the new all-female swing band in residence at Piney Woods after April 1941 when the Sweethearts began traveling cross-country. Holloway also reveals that the Swinging Rays were understudies of the Sweethearts, and they would even go so far as to perform for the Sweethearts whenever the Sweethearts were forced to attend school because they had been missing too many classes. Indeed, in 1941 several girls in the band fled the school's bus when they found out that some of them would not graduate because they had been touring with the band instead of sitting in class.

Leaving Piney Woods
Soon to be recognized at the national level, the Piney Woods all-female jazz band known as the International Sweethearts of Rhythm, who had since the band's inception in 1937 performed in affiliation with the school, turned professional and severed connections with Piney Woods in April 1941. Shortly thereafter the band settled in Arlington, Virginia, where a wealthy Virginian provided support for them. Members from different races, including Latina, Asian, Caucasian, Black, Indian and Puerto Rican, lent the band an "international" flavor, and the name International Sweethearts of Rhythm was given to the group. Composed of 14- to 19-year-olds, the band included Pauline Braddy (tutored on drums by Sid Catlett and Jo Jones), Willie Mae Wong (sax), Edna Williams and thirteen others, including Helen Jones Woods, who was the daughter of the Piney Wood School's founder. Anna Mae Winburn became bandleader in 1941 after resigning from her former position leading an all-male band, the Cotton Club Boys in North Omaha, Nebraska, which featured the famous guitarist Charlie Christian until the band was "raided" by Fletcher Henderson.  After she joined the group, Winburn would remain their prominently poised bandleader until their disbandment.

The first composer for the band was Eddie Durham, with Jesse Stone taking over in 1941. Durham left the Sweethearts to form his own band, Eddie Durham's All-Star Girls Orchestra, taking some of the Sweethearts with him. Jesse Stone's biggest contribution to the band was that he brought more professional musicians into the array of performers and worked at length to bridge the gap of instrumental proficiency between the more and the less experienced of the group. Two of Stone's added star performers were trumpeter-vocalist Ernestine "Tiny" Davis and saxophonist Vi Burnside, both of whom were once members of the mid-1930s all-black Harlem Playgirls. The new 16-piece International Sweethearts of Rhythm featured a strong brass section, heavy percussion, and a deep rhythmic sense, along with many of the best female musicians of the day. Lewis Porter, in a record review, shared the general stylistic qualities of the band that are shown in the band's self-titled recording, The International Sweethearts of Rhythm: "The sixteen recordings here reveal the dynamic blues playing and driving riffs for which the band was noted, as captured in Armed Forces Radio Service broadcasts of 1945 and 1946."

The venues where the International Sweethearts of Rhythm played, such as the Apollo Theatre in Harlem, the Howard Theatre in Washington, D.C., the Regal Theatre in Chicago, the Cotton Club in Cincinnati, the Riviera in St. Louis, the Dreamland in Omaha, or the Club Plantation and Million Dollar Theater in Los Angeles, were predominantly, if not only, for black audiences. Indeed, Leonard Feather states in a Los Angeles Times article about the International Sweethearts of Rhythm that "if you are white, whatever your age, chances are you have never heard of the Sweethearts[...]". In any case, the Sweethearts swiftly rose to fame, as evidenced in one Howard Theater show when the band set a new box office record of 35,000 patrons in one week of 1941.  A great advantage to touring across the states was that, in Hollywood, California, they were able to make short films to use as "filler" in movie theaters.

While the International Sweethearts of Rhythm were successful, as they made two coast-to-coast tours in their bus, unfortunately, a few impediments remained in their way for the entirety of their touring career. Nevertheless, as a racially mixed band, they defied the Jim Crow laws of the South. Because of the Jim Crow laws in the southern states of the former Confederacy, during the time that the Sweethearts toured the U.S., the band's pianist Johnnie Mae Rice mentions in the 1980 Kansas City Women's Jazz Festival interview that "[They] practically lived on the bus, using it for music rehearsals and regular school classes, arithmetic and everything". Despite being stars around the country, when the band traveled in the South, all of the members ate and slept in the bus because of the segregation laws that prevented them from using restaurants and hotels. During the 1980 Kansas City Women's Jazz Festival, band member Roz Cron (saxophonist) discussed one of many salient experiences that she and the band had while on tour in the Jim Crow South: "We white girls were supposed to say 'My mother was black and my father was white' because that was the way it was in the South.  Well, I swore to the sheriff in El Paso that that's what I was.  But he went through my wallet and there was a photo of my mother and father sitting before our little house in New England with the picket fence, and it just didn't jell.  So I spent my night in jail." Because of situations like this one, the band members constantly engaged in extra precautionary measures.  For example, the white women in the band wore dark makeup on stage to avoid arrest. As if the racial discrimination was not enough, as professional, travelling musicians, for most of their touring career the racially integrated Sweethearts unfortunately made relatively little money to support themselves, as Willie Mae Wong Scott (a saxophonist of the group) explains during the 1980 Kansas City Women's Jazz Festival interview: "The original members received $1 a day for food plus $1 a week allowance, for a grand total of $8 a week.  That went on for years, until we got a substantial raise—to $15 a week.  By the time we broke up, we were making $15 a night, three nights a week."

Popularity
After Stone left in 1943, he was replaced by Maurice King, who continued on the tradition of professionalism that Stone brought to the group. King later arranged for Gladys Knight and the Detroit Spinners. The band performed at the Apollo Theater in 1943. In 1944 the band was named "America's No. 1 All-Girl Orchestra" by Downbeat magazine.  At this point, the International Sweethearts of Rhythm enjoyed an enormous following among the African-American audiences playing "battle-of-the-bands" concerts against bands led by Fletcher Henderson and Earl Hines and selling out massive venues including Chicago's Rhumboogie Club.  In The International Sweethearts of Rhythm: The Ladies Jazz Band from Piney Woods Country Life School, author D. Antoinette Handy unearths a New York Age report from early 1944, which describes one particular battle between the International Sweethearts of Rhythm and an all-male big band: 

During World War II, letter-writing campaigns from overseas African American soldiers demanded them, and in 1945 the band embarked on a six-month European tour to France and Germany, making them the first black women to travel with the USO.

In 1943, after Eddie Durham's All-Star Girl Orchestra was formed, many members left the Sweethearts to play in the new band.

Vi Wilson, who for a time was a member of the International Sweethearts of Rhythm before she started playing double bass for the Darlings of Rhythm in the late 1940s, speaks of moments on tour when all-women African American bands would have jam sessions that would turn into "battle-of-the-bands" sessions, all of which (at times) occurred in front of an audience of men: 

The International Sweethearts of Rhythm also performed in 1948 alongside Dizzy Gillespie at the fourth famed annual Cavalcade of Jazz concert held at Wrigley Field in Los Angeles on September 12. Also on the program that day were Frankie Laine, Joe Turner, The Honeydrippers, Little Miss Cornshucks, Jimmy Witherspoon, The Blenders, and The Sensations.  They also performed at the eighth Cavalcade of Jazz concert held also at Wrigley Field in Los Angeles on June 1, 1952 when Anna Mae Winburn was leading.  Other featured artists were Jerry Wallace, Toni Harper, Roy Brown and His Mighty Men, Louis Jordan, Jimmy Witherspoon, and Josephine Baker.

In 1980, jazz pianist and historian Marian McPartland convinced the organizers of Kansas City's third annual Women's Jazz Festival into include the reunion and group interview of members of the International Sweethearts of Rhythm. Included in this interview were nine of the original members, as well as six of the band's later additional members (four of which were Caucasian). This interview was an integral moment in history, where many of the former band members were able to come together, reminisce, and share some of their most salient lived experiences, as women of many different ethnicities playing big band jazz music all over America in the late 1930s and throughout most of the 1940s.

Folding
A great number of reasons, both known and purported, have been doled out as to why the International Sweethearts of Rhythm began their gradual disbandment after they returned from their European tour in 1946: marriage, career change, tiring of always being on the road, aging, not enough money for all the effort, managerial issues, deaths in the group, etc. Tiny Davis had to turn down the opportunity to tour again with the band in 1946. Mrs. Rae Lee Jones continued to fight for the life of the International Sweethearts of Rhythm, but after 1946, the key instrumentalists had already left the group, leaving the band to unravel and unfold finally with Mrs. Jones's passing away in 1949.

Carline Ray Russell, guitarist for the Sweethearts between May 1946 and March 1947 noted that "the musical tides were changing". Author D. Antoinette Handy shares the conclusions of jazz historian Frank Tirro about a major paradigm shift in jazz history at the time of the Sweethearts' disbandment:

Legacy
Despite the impact of the International Sweethearts of Rhythm being repeatedly ignored in popular histories of jazz, the band enjoyed a resurgence in popularity among feminists in the 1960s and 1970s.  In fact, the band was among the first marketed as women's music.  Several feminist writers, musicologists, and others have taken on the task of elevating women's contributions to and integral participation in the making of jazz history.  For example, Sherrie Tucker, author of several articles on the subject matter as well as the book Swing Shift: "All-Girl" Bands of the 1940s, states the importance of bringing women into the male-dominated construction of jazz history: 

With this said, perhaps one of the greatest outcomes of the feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s, for the International Sweethearts of Rhythm and their devoted fans at least, is the record contribution of the producer Rosetta Reitz, who has shared with the world a small but quintessential piece of aural history.  Her biographical liner notes for the International Sweethearts of Rhythm record, as well as top quality recordings, have been made available worldwide through her company, Rosetta Records, whose focus is primarily to feature female and black jazz and blues musicians who are not usually recognized for their tremendous talents. The International Sweethearts of Rhythm record compilation (1984) was followed two years later by a documentary short film directed and produced by Greta Schiller and Andrea Weiss, "at the onset of the third-wave feminist movement". The documentary film premiered at the 1986 New York Film Festival.

There has also been considerable scholarship conducted regarding the "International" aspect of their name and the effect it had on the band's acceptance among African Americans and whites in the South. According to one jazz historian the band membership included "Willie Mae Wong, Chinese saxophonist; Alma Cortez, Mexican clarinet player; Nina de LaCruz, Indian saxophonist; and Nova Lee McGee, Hawaiian trumpet player. They were all children of mixed parents; the rest were Afro-American." A publicity poster for the band's September 1940 performance in Emporia, Virginia included the text "America's Greatest Female Band, The International Sweethearts of Rhythm, In Whose Veins Flow the Blood of Many Races: Indian, Mexican, Chinese, Negro". The first white musicians joined in 1943.

There were also several lesbians in the band, including Tiny Davis, whose independent music career and partnership with Ruby Lucas were later the subject of Schiller and Weiss' documentary Tiny and Ruby: Hell Divin' Women.

In 2004 the Kit McClure Band released The Sweethearts Project on Redhot Records. It is a tribute album recorded entirely with an all-female band using only songs the Sweethearts recorded.

In March 2011, six of the surviving members of the band donated memorabilia and artifacts from their touring years to the National Museum of American History. The ceremony marking the donations was the kick-off event of the Smithsonian Institution's Jazz Appreciation Month, and the band members received a standing ovation from attendees.

In 2012, the compilation album International Sweethearts of Rhythm: Hottest Women’s Band of the 1940s was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Recording Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

Personnel
The lineup of the International Sweethearts of Rhythm changed throughout the band's career. The names listed below are how the members were billed at the time; names after marriage may be different.

 Virginia Audley † – vocalist
 Grace Bayron – saxophone
 Judy Bayron – trombone
 Pauline Braddy † – drums
 Lorraine Brown – tenor and baritone saxophone
 Nancy Brown – trumpet
 Clora Bryant – trumpet and vocalist
 Vi Burnside – tenor saxophone
 Toby Butler – trumpet
 Ina Belle Byrd † – saxophone, trombone
 Ray Carter – trumpet
 Ester Louise Cooke – trumpet and trombone
 Alma Cortez † – clarinet and saxophone
 Rosalind "Roz" Cron ‡ – alto saxophone
 Ernestine "Tiny" Davis – trumpet
 Nina de La Cruz † – saxophone
 Lucille Dixon – bass
 Amy Garrison – saxophone
 Margaret "Trump" Gipson – bass
 Ione Grisham † – alto saxophone
 Irene Grisham † – tenor saxophone
 Helen Jones † – trombone
 Zena Latto – saxophone 
 Roxanna Lucas – guitar
 Evelyn McGee † – vocalist
 Nova Lee McGee † – trumpet
 Colleen Murray – tenor saxophone Sadie Pankey † – trumpet
 Geneva Frances Perry – alto and tenor saxophone
 Marge Pettiford – saxophone
 Mim Polak – trumpet
 Corinne Posey – trombone
 Lena Posey – trombone
 Carline Ray – double bass
 Johnnie Mae Rice † – piano
 Bernice Rothchild † – bass
 Helen Saine – baritone and alto saxophone
 Edna Smith – bass
 Mabel Louise "Big Maybelle" Smith – vocalist
 Ernestine Snyder †
 Lucy Snyder †
 Johnnie Mae Stansbury – trumpet
 Jean Starr – trumpet
 Jean Travis – trombone
 Edna Williams † – trumpet, accordion, singer, arranger
 Selma Lee Williams – tenor saxophone
 Anna Mae Winburn – band leader, singer, piano, guitar
 Willie Mae Wong † – baritone saxophone 
 Myrtle Young – tenor saxophone

Arrangers/musical directors:
 Eddie Durham
 Maurice King
 Jesse Stone

 † Members of the charter 1937 band:
 ‡ One of the first white Sweethearts

Discography
The band only formally recorded four commercial songs during their existence.

International Sweethearts of Rhythm: Hottest Women's Band of the 1940s (Rosetta Records RR 1312)

Track listing
 "Galvanizing" (Maurice King)
 "Sweet Georgia Brown (Bernie, Pinkard, Casey)
 "Central Avenue Boogie" (Buck Clayton)
 "Bugle Call Rag" (Meyers, Pettis, Schoebel)
 "She's Crazy with the Heat" (Maurice King)
 "Jump Children" (Sweethearts and King)
 "Vi Vigor" (Maurice King)
 "Lady Be Good" ( George and Ira Gershwin)
 "Gin Mill Special" (Erskine Hawkins)
 "Honeysuckle Rose" (Razaf and Waller)
 "That Man of Ine" (Maurice King)
 "Diggin' Dykes" (Vi Burnside)
 "Don't Get It Twisted" (Maurice King)
 "Tuxedo Junction" (Dash, Johnson, Hawkins, Feyne)
 "Slightly Frantic (Maurice King)
 "One O'Clock Jump" (Count Basie)

The following album is a compilation of many of the live radio appearances they made:

Hot Licks 1944-1946: Rare Recordings From One of the Best American All Girl Bands of the Swing Era
Tracks: Bugle Call Rag, Galvanizing, Sweet Georgia Brown, Central Avenue Boogie, Lady Be Good, Gin Mill Special, Honeysuckle Rose, Diggin' Dykes, Slightly Frankie, One O'Clock Jump, Tuxedo Junction, Jump Children, She's Crazy With The Heat, That Man Of Mine, Vi Vigor, Don't Get It Twisted

There are also a few tracks available on Big Band Jazz: The Jubilee Sessions 1943-1946 on Hindsight Records.

Filmography
The International Sweethearts of Rhythm were featured in several short films, one feature-length film,  and two documentary films. They were:
 Harlem Jam Session (1946 Associated Artists Productions - Soundie)
 How About That Jive (1947 Associated Artists Productions - Soundie)
 International Sweethearts of Rhythm (1946 Associated Artists Productions - Soundie)
 Jump Children (1946 Alexander Productions - Soundie)
 That Man of Mine (1946 Alexander Productions - Soundie)
 That Man of Mine (1946 Alexander Productions - feature film)
 Harlem Carnival (1949)
 International Sweethearts of Rhythm (1986 documentary directed by Greta Schiller and Andrea Weiss)
 The Girls in the Band (2011 documentary directed by Judy Chaikin; includes segments on the band)

A 2004 DVD called Swing Era: Sarah Vaughan features Vaughan, along with little-seen material from the International Sweethearts of Rhythm.

See also
 List of all-female bands
 Music in Omaha

Further reading
  (young adult book)
  (juvenile book)

References

External links
 Promotional photo, c. 1946.
 Band photo
 Concert poster
 Band promotional photo
 Profile of Carline Ray (of the International Sweethearts of Rhythm) by Arnold Jay Smith (www.jazz.com)
 "Women in Jazz" by Sherrie Tucker at PBS.org

Category:Swing ensembles
Category:Big bands
Category:Piney Woods Country Life School
Category:History of racial segregation in the United States
Category:Musical groups established in 1937
Category:All-female bands
Category:United States National Recording Registry recordings