The International Sweethearts broke attendance records and toured as a USO act – but racism and sexism largely swept them from public record

Rosalind Cron is a vibrant 95-year-old in red lipstick. She stands 4ft 8in tall, and is the keeper of a beautiful, under-told story about America’s first racially integrated, all-girl swing band, the International Sweethearts of Rhythm. She is one of two surviving Sweethearts in their 90s, and a lucid, bright storyteller.

She greeted me on an early December afternoon in her assisted living facility outside of Los Angeles, where she had made room for a piano and memorabilia.

The International Sweethearts broke attendance records at places such as Washington DC’s Howard Theatre, Harlem’s Apollo Theater, Cincinnati’s Cotton Club and the Riviera in St Louis. They played in the same venues as Count Basie and Dizzy Gillespie, were considered some of the most talented musicians of their day and toured France and Germany as a USO act in 1945.

Unfortunately, racism and sexism largely swept them from the public record; they became footnotes in other people’s stories. Second-wave feminism brought them back into the conversation, and the Sweethearts were later recognized by the Kansas City Women’s Jazz Festival in 1980, and again by the Smithsonian in 2011. However, few videos and recordings survive from the Sweethearts’ time together. A short film (That Man of Mine, with Ruby Dee), two numbers for Leonard Feather and a few pieces for Guild Records remain.

I asked Cron why the Sweethearts weren’t better known. “We were very well known in the black press,” she clarified. “It was the white press that ignored us. And women were under-recorded in the 40s, especially black women.”

Cron, an alto saxophonist, flautist and clarinetist, began playing music at age nine in Newton, Massachusetts, after listening to big band music on her family’s Atwater Kent radio. After a few stints playing with Ada Leonard’s All-American Girl Orchestra, she was recruited to join the Sweethearts. Still a teenager, she joined the band in New Britain, Connecticut, after arguing with a taxi driver who refused to drive her to “the black side of town”.

Even though the band was largely composed of orphaned young women of color from the Piney Woods school outside of Jackson, Mississippi, Cron, a white Jewish teenager with a Boston accent, felt immediate synergy. “I knew I was home,” she said. “We loved each other.”

I asked if it was a leap of faith for her parents to let her leave home for a life on the road. “My father was the first feminist I knew,” she said, smiling.

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The Sweethearts’ beginnings were remarkable. Cron emphasized how close the girls were, many having been brought up together as orphans and sisters at the Piney Woods school. “They were loyal to each other,” she told me. “Deeply loyal.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Vi Burnside solo, Rosalind Cron behind in bandstand. Photograph: Handout

Many original Sweethearts were taught how to play their instruments by Consuela Carter and sent out on the road to earn money for Piney Woods, which was the brainchild of education pioneer Dr Laurence Clifton Jones (also the adoptive father of trombonist Helen Jones, who began playing with the band at age 11). He advertised that the band contained “the blood of many races: Indian, Mexican, Chinese, Hawaiian”.

The girls became a sensation, and their booking success was crucial for the school’s fundraising purposes. Soon, they found themselves on the road more weeks than not, once completing 16 engagements in 12 days.

Exhausted, and convinced they were being exploited, the Sweethearts escaped the grip of the school on the very bus Piney Woods students had built by hand for them. The group hurried across the Mason-Dixon Line to safety. Jones was incensed, and sent the police after them, beginning an exchange in the press that would last for years.

Two businessmen, Al Dade and Dan Gary, partnered with the band’s manager, Rae Lee Jones, to reboot the band. The Sweethearts took up residence in a house in Arlington, Virginia, and welcomed several high-profile members: bandleader Anna Mae Winburn, larger-than-life trumpeter Tiny Davis, saxophonist Vi Burnside and Cron, who stayed with the band for three years. “The money rarely got back to the Sweethearts,” Cron said.

Cron lived and performed with the girls in the deep south during the Jim Crow era, a time when it was illegal for women of color to eat, sleep and share the stage with white people. The Sweethearts kept the shades down on their bus when passing through small towns, and Cron was often the only one who could walk into a restaurant and purchase food for the band. She was arrested in South Carolina and Texas for offences such as walking with a black soldier in uniform and claiming mixed-race parentage. Winburn occasionally used her exceptional stage management skills to block a curious policeman’s view of the mixed-race band on stage.

The band was invited to join the Third and Seventh Armies abroad in 1945, landing in Le Havre, France, to entertain the troops. The Sweethearts were issued USO uniforms that included caps, slacks and jackets – and the women would have frozen if it weren’t for the generosity of the black soldiers who offered them wool caps and long johns. They drove through the bombed-out ruins of Europe, performed for three weeks in Paris, showered in latrines when necessary and occasionally stayed in posh army-acquired villas.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Rosalind Cron at 95. Photograph: Megan Meyhew Bergman

Tiny Davis even smuggled a dog from Paris to New York. “She did what she wanted,” Cron said, a gleam in her eye.

Cron remembered one particular party with GIs. “I walked in and there were all these white balloons,” she said. “No one told me they were prophylactics! I was so naive.”

But this naivety was quickly challenged. During the USO tour, Cron met a cousin who was stationed abroad. He handed her his Brownie camera to keep. She took photos of the Sweethearts, and buildings crumbling after bombings. When she developed the photos later, she discovered gruesome photos of the concentration camps her cousin had helped liberate. As a Jewish woman, these images were staggering to see. “I was so angry all the time,” she said, shaking her head. “I could feel the horror of it all. I wrapped the awful photos in plastic and put them away.”

The Sweethearts began to disband after the war, largely due to exhaustion, the desire to marry, a change in musical sensibilities and the realization that they had been exploited financially once again. The boys were home from the war and back on the bandstands. Cron left the Sweethearts in 1946, and shared an apartment in Spanish Harlem with Helen Saine, her best friend from the band.

Cron remained committed to music and social justice throughout her life, attempting to unionize the insurance agency where she worked, and volunteering as a patient escort at abortion clinics. She stayed in close touch with band members such as Saine, Willie Mae “Rabbit” Wong and Jones, and played in several bands.

Cron had a closeup view of many cruelties of the 20th century. She witnessed the systematic oppression of the women of color she lived and worked with. She helped her best friends navigate the naked racism of the Jim Crow south. She and her bandmates were paid dramatically less than male contemporaries. She bore witness to the cruelty of a war designed to exterminate Jews like herself.

It strikes me that as long as she’s lived, she’s never seen these issues fully resolved. In fact, 75 years later, antisemitism is once again on the rise.

As we sat in Cron’s room, rifling through USO photos and clippings, I found her cousin’s photos of the camp. I think of how important it is now to revisit these stories, and check in with those women like Cron who can still access the realities of harder times, and caution us again about falling into old traps.

The Sweethearts were, in many ways, intersectional feminists ahead of their time. In 2000, Sherrie Tucker, author of Swing Shift, honored the inspirational model of the Sweethearts: “To a white-dominated women’s movement struggling with its own racism,” she wrote, “the Sweethearts provided an upbeat vision of multicultural foremothers: women of color and white women; lesbian and straight, all loving each other and working effortlessly together.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A love letter hidden in a music sheet. Photograph: Handout

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There are two sheets of laminated music on Cron’s piano, written by jazz musician George Russell. A MacArthur genius award winner, he composed the piece as a gift for her in 1944. Seventy years later, when her son had someone examine the pages, they discovered a long-lost love letter to Cron. She has been quietly important to many researchers and practitioners of jazz, and is one of the last living links to the big band era.

When I asked about her favorite song with the Sweethearts, she paused.

“I can’t remember. It was written for the alto saxophone, something by Maurice King.” (King allegedly put the girls through “grueling” rehearsals and later became a Motown staple, arranging for Gladys Knight and Marvin Gaye.)

“Was it Love Will Live Forever?” I asked, having seen the USO set list in her personal archives.

“Oh yes,” she said, lighting up again. “I love those words! I haven’t heard them said like that for a long time. Love Will Live Forever.”

The nurse burst in with afternoon pills. “What’s all the fuss?” she asked Cron. “Are you famous?”

Cron took her pills and swallowed. “A long time ago, I was in a band,” she said. “A very long time ago.”