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, documented the story of these female musicians of color.

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-girl 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-girl vocal group on the road. Following the fundraising successes of the all-girl vocal group and several other Piney Woods musical groups, in 1937 he formed the Swinging Rays of Rhythm, an all-girl 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-girl 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.

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