SWINGIN' WITH THE SWEETHEARTS
APOLLO THEATER, HARLEM, 1943 — Louis Armstrong is backstage. Count Basie, too. But the legends won’t be playing tonight. They’ve come to watch “the girls.”
Mention the Big Band Era and the names are all too familiar. Glenn Miller. Tommy Dorsey. Benny Goodman. All men, white men, leading orchestras of white men. But one remarkable “girl band” emerged from the shadows of Jim Crow.
"If you are white, whatever your age,” jazz critic Leonard Feather wrote, “chances are you have never heard of the Sweethearts.”
Note for note, blare for blare, The International Sweethearts of Rhythm played with the best of the Big Bands. For a dozen years, through Depression, war, and lockdown segregation, this small band of women from a rainbow of races dazzled audiences, lit up ballrooms, and won legions of fans. Watch:
“The girls were ripped off, arrested, harassed, and bullied,” said Catherine Jones, daughter of the band’s trombonist. “But they loved the music, so they continued.”
Like so much other “black joy” that could not be tamped down, The Sweethearts slipped out of the Deep South to amaze America. The seeds of their soul were planted in Mississippi’s Piney Woods where, during the 1920s, a struggling school for orphans began sending student bands on fundraising tours.
The Cotton Blossom Singers led to the Swinging Rays of Rhythm. The bands lived on a dollar a day for food and a dollar a week allowance. They toured in buses fit with bunk beds and a mobile classroom. Laurence and Grace Jones, founders of the Piney Woods Country Life School, managed each band but they could not contain the energy that burst forth when bands became big.
One evening in 1939, belting out boogie in a DC ballroom, the Swinging Rays attracted the attention of a music agent. He offered them diamond rings to leave the school and turn pro. After a farewell return to Mississippi, the renamed International Sweethearts of Rhythm hit the road.
One jazz historian later traced the band’s roots. They 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."
On trumpet, Ernestine “Tiny” Davis was “the female Louis Armstrong.” When she played in DC, Armstrong himself offered her five times her meager Sweethearts salary to join his band. She refused. “Well,” Davis recalled, “I just loved them gals too much.”
Sweethearts conductor Anna Mae Winburn had directed male orchestras before the war, but most were drafted. “When I first joined the International Sweethearts,” Winburn said, “I thought ‘what a cute bunch of girls but I don’t know if I can get along with that many women.’” Winburn, like the Sweethearts’ audiences, was soon smitten.
“We ate together, we slept together, we played together, and our sole purpose was putting across the music. That was the language that was spoken among the girls.”
“We were like sisters,” vocalist Evelyn McGee recalled. “We just loved one another.”
Such love however, threatened Jim Crow. During the war, when a few white women joined, the Sweethearts courted trouble. “It was absolutely necessary that I pass as black, or at least attempt to, using different makeup,” said Roz Cron, a classically trained trombonist from New England. “I always looked very freakish and not quite right. We tried everything we could.”
Rumors of integration sometimes led local sheriffs to search the Sweethearts’ bus. White musicians were scurried out the back, sped to the nearest Greyhound station, and sent out of town. Cron and others met the band at the next stop and played on.
“This was the way I was going live,” Cron said. “I was always going to live with the gals and always eat where they ate and subject myself to whatever they were subjected to.”
Many dismissed the Sweethearts as a novelty band. “They said things like ‘They’re playin’ okay for girls,’ Helen Saines said. “They seemed to think if we were boys we’d sound better.”
But the pros recognized professional style, swing, and musicianship. By 1943, the Sweethearts shared bills with Dizzy Gillespie, Billie Holliday, and Ella Fitzgerald. And when they rocked Armed Forces radio, black soldiers in Europe wrote to invite them overseas.
Just after the war, the Sweethearts toured France and Germany, the first black women hired by the USO. Back home, however, the sisterhood began to struggle.
“The girls, when they came back from Europe,” Winburn recalled, “they fell in love, they started having babies, and it was hard to replace the personnel.” With Big Band giving way to be-bop, the Sweethearts disbanded in 1949.
Except for a few first-wave feminists who championed the group in the Sixties, the Sweethearts were mostly forgotten. A 1980 reunion drew some attention, though trombonist Helen Jones could not bear the memories. Sitting in the audience, “she just started crying,” Catherine Jones said, “and walked out of the ballroom.”
For the rest of the Sweethearts, memory was more kind. Her years with the band, Anna Mae Winburn said, were “something tthat I will always treasure in my heart.”
“The International Sweethearts?” said Evelyn McGee. “I’ve never seen anything like them since and I wonder if I will ever see anything like them again.”