Apr

Swinging with the Sweethearts of Rhythm

The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History will mark the 10th annual Jazz Appreciation Month in April with a monthlong celebration of jazz featuring performances, talks, tours and family-oriented events. This year’s anniversary programming will examine the legacies of women in jazz and kicked off with a special donation ceremony related to the nation’s first integrated, female big band—the International Sweethearts of Rhythm, who began as students in 1937 at the Piney Woods School in Rankin County, Mississippi.

The Sweethearts of Rhythm featuring Marilyn Nelson

The Piney Woods School, founded in 1909 by Laurence Clifton Jones, began on a log under a cedar tree. Students were former slaves and their descendants. Later, a pre-Civil War cabin, $50 and 40 acres were donated to the school by Ed Taylor, a former slave who served as valet to a Union soldier during the Civil War. Families would donate a pig, 25 cents or a jug of syrup to pay their children’s tuition.

The International Sweethearts of Rhythm band members were students, 14 years and older, who paid for their education by performing as a jazz band to help promote and sustain the financially struggling school. The Sweethearts travelled nationwide in a customized tour bus built by the school, named Big Bertha, performing at churches, state fairs, dance and civic halls and entertainment venues such as the Apollo Theater. The band confronted dual biases of gender and race and excelled during a period in history when the majority of African Americans lived in the South under Jim Crow laws.

Beginning March 29, the museum is displaying archival material about the Sweethearts and hosting special online and public programming to highlight the legacy of the Piney Woods School and its female band. Several of the original Sweethearts shared their memories in a special presentation March 30.

Rosalind Cron, a white woman who joined the group in 1943, held her audience spellbound as she described a racial incident in El Paso. She was the last to pack her saxophone, and that night a black soldier volunteered to escort her as she caught up with her band mates. “There was a car circulating the street with two sheriffs. The car stopped and one got out,” Cron said. The two were taken to jail and the soldier told to get out of town. Cron stayed in jail all night until the Sweethearts’ chaperone came to get her out.

Jazz! The Smithsonian Anthology

The monthlong jazz celebration will also highlight Mary Lou Williams, an innovative jazz pianist, composer and arranger who performed with Duke Ellington, among others. Her work is included in the new “Jazz: The Smithsonian Anthology” that examines the history of jazz in music and narrative. “Jazz: The Smithsonian Anthology” is a 111-track, six-CD and companion book set available from Smithsonian Folkways. Legendary jazz artist Williams is featured on the 2011 JAM poster, which is distributed to schools, libraries, music and jazz educators, music merchants and manufacturers, radio stations, art presenters and U.S. embassies worldwide. The portrait used for the poster was created by Keith Henry Brown, an African American artist and the former creative art director for jazz at Lincoln Center.

For a complete schedule of JAM events, go to smithsonianjazz.org.

The Smithsonian operates the world’s most comprehensive set of jazz programs and the National Museum of American History is home to jazz collections that include 100,000 pages of Duke Ellington’s unpublished music and such objects as Ella Fitzgerald’s red dress, Dizzy Gillespie’s angled trumpet, John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme” manuscript and Goodman’s clarinet.

Click to watch the International Sweethearts of Rhythm perform “Jump Children!”