Helen Jones played trombone with the International Sweethearts of Rhythm in the 1940s in their heyday as the top female jazz band in the country, but she started playing with the group when she was only 11 years old, when it was still the "school band" of Piney Woods Country Life School in Mississippi.
Named by Downbeat magazine as America's #1 All-Girl Orchestra in 1944, they enjoyed an enormous following among the African-American audiences who heard them on the black theater circuit at the Apollo in New York, the Paradise in Detroit, and the Howard in Washington, D.C. They played Battle-of-the-Bands concerts with jazz orchestras led by Fletcher Henderson and Earl Hines. Letter-writing campaigns from overseas black soldiers demanded the International Sweethearts of Rhythm and in 1945 the band embarked on a 6-month European tour making them the first black women to travel with the USO.
Back in the USA, even contending with the gas and tire shortages of WWII, the International Sweethearts of Rhythm made two coast-to-coast tours in their bus--Big Bertha. As a racially mixed band, they defied the Jim Crow laws of the south--the white girls in the band wore dark makeup on stage and stayed in the bus when they traveled in order to avoid arrest.
Today, Helen Jones Woods is 80 years old and lives in Omaha, NE.
Right: Sweethearts in Chicago, 1942, courtesy of Johnnie Mae Rice Graham
