By: DINITIA SMITH
08/10/00

They called Viola Smith the female Gene Krupa for the way she would hurl her drumstick onto her drum, then jump up in the air and catch it as it bounced. Clora Bryant dazzled them with her trumpet solos. Roz Cron was known for the beautiful, clear tone and distinct phrasing of her alto sax and clarinet.

They were stars of the so-called all-girl bands that played the dance halls and U.S.O. stages
of World War II while the men were off at war. They played in groups like Phil Spitalny's "Hour
of Charm," the International Sweethearts of Rhythm, Ada Leonard's All-American Girls and
the Prairie View Coeds.

But when the war ended, their glory faded. As men resumed their musical careers, the all-girl
bands gradually broke up. Some women went on to careers playing in small groups or as soloists, but it was never the same. Never again would so many women play together to such appreciative mass audiences. They were "Swing Shift Maisies" — like Rosie the Riveter, substitutes for the
real thing: men.

"The men felt like: 'Girl musicians, what are they doing on the road? It's a male job,' " Ms. Smith said. "Only God can make a tree," the swing historian George T. Simon wrote in "The Big Bands" (1967, London: Macmillan), "and only men can play good jazz." In many ways, Mr. Simon's has been the prevailing view.

But in a book published last month, "Swing Shift" (Duke University Press), Sherrie Tucker, assistant professor of women's studies at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, has recaptured the faded history of the all-girl bands.

It is a study of how women negotiated boundaries of gender and race to play jazz and adapted their dress and music to be accepted. " 'Swing Shift' is about the construction of what is a jazz musician and what is a worker," she said, "how women didn't fit the categories and couldn't be seen as authentic musicians." The book is also about how race affected the bands.

Black and white groups were often perceived as having their own distinct sounds. Some white women wanted to play jazz so much that they passed for African-American so they could tour with
black groups in the South. And in traveling together, eating together, sharing hotel rooms, Ms. Tucker says, the black and white women of the all-girl bands played an important role in paving the way for
desegregation.

Jazz's long blue notes, its wild drum crescendos, have always been thought of as male sounds. The very essence of the form, the jam session, is based on one-upmanship. The all-girl bands of World War II had to "project popular forms of femininity at the same time music that was
authentic jazz was thought of as masculine," Ms. Tucker said. "It was almost like a juggling act, because they were trying to get the categories to overlap so that people wouldn't notice."

There were, of course, women's jazz groups before the war, but they were viewed as "a kind of sex show," Ms. Tucker said. And during the war, female groups were not seen as professionals either, but as "patriotic, temporary musical groups to entertain the soldiers."

After the war, the musicians' union pressured bands to hire returning veterans, and many women were funneled into "pink collar" jobs as beauticians, waitresses, teachers. Some played the organ for church choirs. The women who continued in jazz "were often stigmatized by men as gay, as women often are who assume male jobs," Ms. Tucker said. The first problem a woman had was even getting to play a "male" instrument like the trumpet or drums, Ms. Tucker said. They usually got their start in high school bands or because male relatives inspired them. Ms. Smith, the drummer, got her break during the late 1920's and 30's in the Schmitz Sisters, a family orchestra in Wisconsin organized by her father. "Other girl musicians had a tough time getting started," said Ms. Smith, who lives in Manhattan. After the Schmitz Sisters disbanded, she and a sister formed the Coquettes. Ms. Smith, who declined to give her age, was careful to dress femininely in chiffon because, she said, "anybody doing a male job, they would think 'Oh, she must be tough.' "

In 1942, Ms. Smith joined Phil Spitalny's 'Hour of Charm,' the most mainstream and commercially successful of the all-girl bands. The Spitalny sound was orchestral, "feminized" with harps and strings, Ms. Tucker said. The women wore formal gowns and projected an aura of sweetness.

The same year that she joined Spitalny, Ms. Smith published an editorial in Down Beat magazine, "Give Girl Musicians a Break!" Instead of replacing the male musicians who had been drafted with mediocre male talent, "Why not let some of the great girl musicians of the country take their place?"

By the war's end, Ms. Smith had wearied of life on the road, traveling all night between engagements and then having to look glamorous. Car accidents were common. Gasoline was rationed and expensive. Big bands in general were being disbanded, and Americans were staying
home to watch television. Ms. Smith continued playing, mostly club dates. She was a drummer in
"Cabaret" on Broadway for three years. After that she did summer theater, until 1974. She didn't want to play one-night stands. "No male orchestra would book me," she said. "You definitely had to
prove yourself more. They were very leery: 'How can girl musicians do the job?' "

Clora Bryant, the jazz trumpeter, got her start at 15 in Denison, Tex., when she borrowed her brother's trumpet. Her father "went in the bedroom and cried because I was so good," she said from Los Angeles.

Ms. Bryant, who is black, was accepted at Oberlin College, but chose Prairie View College in Texas, a historically black institution, because of its all-girl band, the Prairie View Coeds. The Prairie View Coeds were known for improvising. Many, though not all, black all-girl bands emphasized improvisation, Ms. Tucker said, while many white groups emphasized arrangements. Poorer bands — black or white — couldn't afford to have arrangements written for them, and black bands were often poor. Emphasis on the second and fourth beats was also associated with blacks, while four even beats and sticking to the melody were associated with whites. Not surprisingly, conditions were tougher for black groups. Accommodations were inferior. In the Jim Crow South there was police surveillance. Blacks couldn't stay in white hotels. Food was hard to get, and the pay was lower. "As soon as a club was doing good, they would fire the black group, hire a white group and pay them more," Ms. Bryant said. "Then the club would fail and they'd hire another black group." In 1944 Ms. Bryant played the Apollo Theater in New York, "one of the highlights of my life," she said. With the war's end, many women married and left the bands. "The men were still holding onto the jobs, trying to hold us back," Ms. Bryant said. But "my dad taught me to be aggressive and assertive."

After her family moved to Los Angeles in 1945, she played on Central Avenue, which was a center of jazz in the city, with Hampton Hawes and Sonny Criss. "I worked all the time," she said. She traveled with a smaller all-female group called the Queens of Swing. She was in "The Chicks and the Fiddle," a television variety show featuring an all-girl band in 1951, but it lasted just six weeks. In 1957 she made a record, "Gal With a Horn," (recently reissued in CD by V.S.O.P.). "If she'd been a man, with her talents she would have made more records," Ms. Tucker said.

During the 80's Ms. Bryant played with jazz greats like Bill Berry, Johnny Otis and Billy Williams, and Dizzy Gillespie took her under his wing. In 1989 she performed in Russia at the invitation of Mikhail S. Gorbachev. In recent years, Ms. Bryant has produced jazz concerts, including one in
1993 honoring Gillespie. Today Ms. Bryant is 73 and recovering from heart surgery, but "I'm still
kind of touring," she said. "It's in my blood."

Roz Cron, who played the alto sax and clarinet, got her start in her high school band in Boston. After graduating, she played with Ada Leonard's All-American Girl Orchestra, led by a former stripper. The group was successful, Ms. Tucker writes, because it combined wholesomeness and glamour. Initially the band had a smooth sound, but it became jazzier, more swing. At the same time, the costumes became softer, "as if to ensure the band's overall reception as acceptably feminine," Ms. Tucker writes. Ms. Cron didn't like wearing evening gowns. "I felt it categorized us," she said. "I felt all the men were out there playing in their shirts and ties, just looking very professional, and we were just prancing around in ruffles. And it was very uncomfortable." Ms. Cron, who is white, was invited to join a black group, the International Sweethearts of Rhythm. Most bands were segregated by race, but she accepted because "I just wanted to play," she said. "When I joined the Sweethearts I knew I had come home." The Sweethearts usually wore jackets, white shirts and skirts. But mostly, she loved their sound, its "aggressive, strong drive." She preferred it, she told Ms. Tucker in the book, to the "uptight white rhythm."The Sweethearts were also somewhat unusual in having an arranger, Maurice King, an alto sax player who later became a force at Motown Records. "He was just a genius and wrote beautifully," Ms. Cron said. When the group toured the South, she passed for black so she could go with them. Fraternizing between blacks and whites could lead to arrest, so Ms. Cron, permed her hair to make it kinky and wore dark makeup in a process the women called browning down. "I mostly just stayed in the background," she said.

But in El Paso, Ms. Cron was arrested for walking with a black soldier. The women had learned to manipulate Southern racial prejudice, sometimes to their advantage. The subject of white men raping black women, and of sexual relations between the races in general, was taboo. Light-skinned blacks were a reminder of it. Hoping to embarrass the police into releasing her, Ms. Bryant told the officer that her mother was black and her father white. He didn't believe her, and she was jailed. The next morning two light-skinned black colleagues from the Sweethearts arrived, pretending to be her cousins, and she was released. At the end of the war Ms. Cron left the band. The pay was poor, and she was tired of traveling. Like the Rosie the Riveters who had held men's jobs during the war, Ms. Cron found her opportunities drying up. Returning soldiers were getting the band jobs.

"I played off and on, taking one step forward and two backward," she said. "I studied clarinet very diligently when I went home. I couldn't find any work, and worked in a bank. And then I met my husband." After a nine-year silence, she resumed playing in a community orchestra in
Santa Monica, Calif. "I just turned 75," Ms. Cron said. "I've had two surgeries." The operations forced her to stop performing for a time, and have made playing difficult. "Now I believe I'm going to play for myself," she said. "As a matter of fact," she added, "I picked up the clarinet last week."

In the 1970's, Ms. Cron was a founder of Maiden Voyage, an all-female jazz band that continues to perform. Such bands enjoyed a resurgence during the 60's and 70's, partly because of the women's movement, but their audiences were mostly women. "Most of the time when I see all-women bands playing, it's in a women's jazz festival," Ms. Tucker said. "They still get told, 'You're the first woman
I've ever seen play the trumpet.'