THE PRAIRIE VIEW CO-EDS: BLACK COLLEGE WOMEN MUSICIANS IN CLASS AND ON THE ROAD DURING WORLD WAR II.

The absence of millions of men have [sic] left vacancies in many fields which are rapidly being filled by the fairer sex. At PV, in order that music may still be kept alive, the co-eds have taken over the horns and strings with tremendous success.

--"PV Co-Eds Keep Music Alive" 1944

I said, "If there's this girl band there and I can play my horn, then that's where I was going to go!" So I turned down Bennett and Oberlin and went on to Prairie View because I wanted to play in the band.

--Bryant 1990b

Oh, we ruled the campus: We were traveling all the time, you know. And we had money! And when we'd go out on weekends, our friends would say, "Bring me something back." And we'd bring them food back and all of that. Oh, we were something else.

--Medearis 1997

On the eve of the U.S. entrance into World War II, Prairie View College was not only the biggest black institute of higher education in Texas; it was the only four-year public college in the state that African Americans could attend. Founded in 1878, when most white Texans believed that black education was impossible, foolish, and possibly dangerous, Prairie View College (now Prairie View A&M University) shares a proud history with other distinguished black colleges established simultaneously with, and in response to, the rise of the southern system of mandatory segregation known as "Jim Crow" (Heintze 1985, 17-19, 45).

To fully appreciate the significance of historically black colleges, it is important to recall that, before the Civil War, every southern state except Tennessee legally prohibited the education of black Americans, free or enslaved. After 1865, black education was no longer a crime, but it was still hard to secure because states invented new laws that required black students to attend segregated, or "Jim Crow," facilities. As Angela Davis (1983, 105) observed, black people who were able to secure an education under these conditions "inevitably associated their knowledge with their people's collective battle for freedom." From a contemporary vantage point that foresees, among other things, the struggles of the Civil Rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s, we probably should not be too surprised that the same states that demanded separate education were in no hurry to erect public black schools, especially black colleges. So, while black Americans paid taxes on schools they could not attend, private black colleges were founded by black churches, Northern missionary and philanthropic groups, and the Freedman's Bureau.(1) Prairie View College was one of a small number of public black colleges established by southern states in the years between 1866 and 1900.

The students who attended Prairie View College in 1940 did so at a time when three-fourths of the twelve million black people in the United States still lived in states where black education was only legal if separate (see Roebuck and Murty 1993, 28; Hill 1985, 11). Despite this formula for unequal social standing of blacks and whites, Prairie View and other historically black colleges prevailed as distinguished centers for higher education, preparing many African Americans to obtain means of earning a better and more dignified living. In 1942, Prairie View had an enrollment of 1,420 students. For women particularly--and black college women comprised half the student body of black colleges even before World War II--a college education provided urgently needed alternatives to menial labor such as domestic work and sharecropping. While white women with high school educations could obtain clerical positions, black women were largely barred from such work but could become teachers in black schools if they went to college (Hartmann 1982, 107-115). In 1940, Prairie View emphasized programs in vocational agriculture, mechanical arts, liberal arts, pre-nursing, and home economics (Heintze 1985, 80). In addition, degrees were offered in business and sciences. Music majors could choose from several degree options in both general music and music education. And Prairie View was also the home of a famous extracurricular dance band, the Prairie View Collegians.

Many black colleges in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s boasted popular dance bands. These bands were sources of pride as well as entertainment for black audiences both inside and outside the campus walls. Traveling entertainment from black colleges was already a time-honored tradition, dating from nearly as early as the establishment of the colleges themselves. Perhaps the best remembered today are the Fisk Jubilee Singers, whose many concert tours between 1871 and 1932 raised money to expand Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee (which was founded in 1867); their tours have been credited with creating international awareness of the beauty and power of African-American spirituals.(2) They also represented the existence of black colleges wherever they performed. Although different from choral groups in obvious ways, dance bands consisting of young black college students traveling off-campus combined skillful renderings of hits of the day with living proof that black colleges were alive and well, despite an established history of political, legal, and economic obstacles. Activities of black college bands were widely reported in both the entertainment and college sections of national black newspapers such as the Chicago Defender and Pittsburgh Courier.

Besides the Prairie View Collegians, other well-known and popular dance bands emanated from Wiley College in Marshall, Texas; Alabama State College in Montgomery, Alabama; Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee; Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia; and Wilberforce University in Wilberforce, Ohio. Many musicians from these college-based ensembles later became famous in the professional music world. Bandleader Erskine Hawkins got his start in the Alabama State Collegians, as did trumpet player Wilber "Dud" Bascomb, who would later star in Hawkins' famous professional dance band. Horace Henderson (bandleader and brother of Fletcher Henderson) led a dance band at Wilberforce during his days as a college student. Drummer Roy Porter and trumpet player Kenny Dorham both played in the Wiley Collegians while they were students at Wiley College. Blues singer Charles Brown was a member of the Prairie View Collegians. Like most such bands, the Prairie View Collegians played for campus events as well as off-campus professional jobs. And--also like most college dance bands of the day--the Prairie View Collegians was an all-male organization.(3)

However, during the auditions of 1940, bandleader Will Henry Bennett was inspired to make an exception to the men-only status. A gifted alto saxophonist named Bert Etta Davis arrived on the campus that fall. Not only did she possess a serious desire to play in the dance band, but she already had the skills and practical experience that would make her a valuable member. Despite being both female and a first-year student, Davis entered the tryouts for the famed Prairie View Collegians amid exclusively male competition. After waiting for her name to be called--she was twenty-seventh on the roster for saxophonists--she proceeded to dazzle onlookers with her mature jazz playing. There was no doubt that she could read the charts, and she could solo as well. At the end of the tryouts, the female alto player from San Antonio had earned the third saxophone position.

Unfortunately, as Davis explained to D. Antoinette Handy in 1980, she was prevented from occupying that coveted chair--not by the male bandleader nor by disgruntled male saxophonists, not by the male head of the music department nor by the male president of the university, but by the Dean of Women, who found the concept of a young college woman in an all-male dance band entirely inappropriate (Handy 1981, 134-136). Female students played alongside men in the marching band and concert orchestra, even in the ROTC (Reserve Officers Training Corps) band, but the dance band apparently carried vastly less agreeable connotations.

The world was changing rapidly in 1940. The effects of wars in Europe and the Pacific would soon be felt at the Texas college, even filtering down to such entrenched notions as what was considered appropriate regarding college bands and college women. The same semester that Bert Etta Davis tried to join the Prairie View Collegians, the Selective Service Bill was passed by Congress. Male college students were required to register for the draft; military camps were being set up and populated in nearby towns. Prairie View was briefly considered as the site for a training school for black pilots until Tuskegee Institute in Alabama was chosen instead. Male college students signed up for programs like ROTC, with hopes and sometimes with promises that they would be allowed to graduate before being absorbed by the armed forces. In the meantime, the Prairie View Collegians entertained the troops by adding military training camps to their performance schedules.

On January 2, 1943, the Chicago Defender reported, "Will Henry Bennett and his Prairie View Collegians set something of a record for the number of soldier dates played in one week while on his Christmas tour of army camps, flying fields and USO centers `deep in the heart of Texas.' They played five engagements for the soldier boys within five days" ("Texas Collegians Entertain" 1943).

During the next few months, many of the young men who spent their 1942 Christmas vacation playing for soldiers became soldiers themselves. By the spring of 1943, so many men had been drafted from the student body that the Prairie View Collegians had dwindled to a much smaller band. It still played on- and off-campus events, but the band had no guarantees about how long the remaining members would be allowed to stay in school. So in February 1943, bandleader and music teacher Will Henry Bennett began recruiting women for an all-female dance band, the Prairie View Co-Eds. Bert Etta Davis, by then a public school music major and secretary of the junior class, would be its star soloist.

The Original Prairie View Co-Eds

Margaret Grigsby was a senior biology major with medical school ambitions when Bennett recruited her for his all-female band. When I interviewed her in October 1997, Grigsby was a retired doctor and emeritus Professor of Medicine at Howard University, the well-known historically black college located in Washington, D.C. According to Grigsby, her college band activities had been recreational only; unlike some other members of the band, she had no professional musical ambitions. Medical school had been her dream since high school, and she was working on that when she played with the Co-Eds. Nonetheless, she spoke fondly about her band experiences, about traveling to places she had never been before, playing opposite celebrities including Ella Fitzgerald, and performing at the Apollo in New York City during the summer of 1944.

"It was just something extracurricular," she explained. "It wasn't any big deal as far as I was concerned. I just liked doing it" (Grigsby 1997a). She grew up in a family where everyone played a musical instrument. "My father played a guitar, my brother cornet. Both my sisters played the piano." Grigsby played trombone at Jack Yates High School in Houston before entering college in 1939. Throughout her college years, she played in the marching band and the concert orchestra (both of which were "co-ed," including both male and female members). It was from this pool of women musicians in existing bands that Bennett was able to quickly fill the chairs of the Prairie View Co-Eds' sixteen-piece dance orchestra. As a trombonist, Grigsby was instantly recruited for one of the harder-to-fill positions. She enjoyed the new activity but was also deeply affected by the more unpleasant and drastic changes taking place on the campus during her senior year:

   The Selective Service told the guys that if they'd join some type of group
   [presumably the army reserves or ROTC] that they would be exempt from the
   draft until they graduated. They just suckered them. They swept in on the
   campus and took every guy they could get their hands on. So that didn't
   leave anybody playing in the [marching] band except mostly girls and a few
   boys that were too young to be in the draft. And so in order to have any
   type of college dances and so forth, the girls in the band were formed into
   a girls orchestra." (Grigsby 1997a)

Between the fall of 1941 and the fall of 1943, the number of men enrolled in black colleges was cut in half (Hill 1985, 11-12). Although the draft and enlistment also tipped the gender balance at mainstream (white) colleges, the female-to-male ratios were markedly different. White college populations had contained far higher numbers of men than women before the war; but because black colleges were already composed of equal numbers of male and female students, the disappearance of half of the men resulted in a student body in which women out-numbered men to an even greater degree than was the case in white colleges (Hartmann 1982, 103-115). One report set the female-to-male ratio at black colleges in 1944 at five to one (Kittrell 1944, 11-12). As Grigsby recalled, the male musicians had turned down an opportunity to enlist as an intact service band because they believed they would be allowed to graduate. However, it is not possible to say whether this promise would have been kept by the armed forces; recruitment offers in World War II, as in other wars, did not always materialize according to plan. But many of the male students from Prairie View would regret not having accepted the offer to fulfill their military obligations in a band with their classmates.

Another musician recruited for Bennett's new band was Bettye Jean Bradley (now Kimbrough), a sophomore music education major and alto saxophone player from Alto, Texas. Bradley was a member of both the marching band and the ROTC band, and she was a prime candidate for the all-female dance band. Bennett asked her to join. She accepted, although she had to seek her parents' approval because the band would play off-campus engagements. The bandleader then switched her from alto saxophone, which she had played in high school, to tenor saxophone; Bradley was pleased to discover that it was easier to maintain an acceptable tone on the larger instrument.

Although new to the tenor saxophone, she was no novice when it came to performing music. In Bradley's words, she had played her first instrument, piano, for her church choir "three-fourths of my life from the time I was about nine. I started playing very, very young. And my mother was not a particular fan of boogie woogie, and that was about the right thing at that time" (Kimbrough 1997). In other words, it might not have been "right" for her mother, but it was the "right thing" for Bradley and for popular audiences thrilling in the enormous comeback the boogie woogie piano style of the 1920s was making in youth-oriented big-band music. Bradley enjoyed boogie woogie and other popular music styles and spent many hours in the local honky-tonk listening to the juke box for "anyone who had a good beat." Hoping to steer her daughter toward a concert piano future, her mother sent her to piano lessons, where she learned Beethoven and Chopin as well as popular songs of the day. But Bradley's musical tastes were relentlessly divergent from those of her mother. A source of particular consternation for her mother was Bradley's piano improvisations in church as she accompanied the choir. "Of course I put a lot in it that wasn't in it, and my mother gave me the eye!" Bradley laughed at the memory. "And threatened to kill me." She lowered her voice to reproduce the gravity of her mother's disdain for such frivolity. "She did not approve." Her mother never came to hear the Prairie View Co-Eds, not even when they traveled throughout Texas; but, as Bradley noted, "I was lucky my mother let me go in the first place. Only after she found out we'd be well chaperoned!"

After filling as many positions as possible from musicians in the marching band, concert orchestra, and ROTC band, Bennett relied on the flexibility of female music majors to fill the remaining instrumental needs. Argie Mae Edwards (now Medearis), a music major from Waco, Texas, was studying for a career as a school band director. She had played the piano all her life, but Bennett gave her a vote of confidence as a future band and orchestra teacher when he recruited her as the double bass player.

"I wasn't playing the bass," said Edwards, "but I had a knowledge of just about all the instruments. They needed a bass player, and they didn't have one. So one of the fellas on the campus who did play bass with the male orchestra taught me to play bass. His name was Thomas Cleaver. And so, that's how I made it" (Medearis 1997).

Margaret Bradshaw had played saxophone in her high school band in Denison, Texas; but she too was asked to learn another instrument as Bennett completed his new dance band: "Those of us in the music department were used to fill in. For example, he only had one trombone, so he gave me a trombone" (Bradshaw 1997).

Other members of the original Prairie View Co-Eds included saxophonists Charlotte Sims, Bernice Payne (Posey), Melvia Wrenn, and Elizabeth Johnson and trumpet players Marcellus Gauthier and Flores Jean Davis (Webb), the assistant secretary of the junior class. As a school band, the Prairie View Co-Eds suffered steady personnel turnover, its ranks raided annually by graduation and at any time by marriage or the patriotic and economic lure of defense jobs. Bennett expected that each year the band would have a number of new members--but at least they would not be drafted.

The first version of the Prairie View Co-Eds initially played on campus for dances and events but soon began venturing off-campus on weekends, as Bennett arranged for the band to entertain at military bases, theaters, nightclubs, and dance halls in neighboring Texas towns. "He immediately started booking us to play for dances," recalled Bettye Bradley. "We played in Beaumont, Port Arthur, Houston, just everywhere. There were no men orchestras" (Kimbrough 1997). Argie Mae Edwards concurred, adding that "during the holidays we would play at the different army camps, Fort Sill, Oklahoma, and all of these air bases here in Texas." Edwards explained that the male Prairie View Collegians had previously played off-campus events on weekends but had lost too many of its key players to continue the practice (Medearis 1997). So when the Co-Eds became established, Bennett took the female band out to fill the local demand for dance bands in both black and white segregated venues. Carl Owens, a talented member of the Prairie View Collegians, assumed leadership of what was left of the male band.

At the same time that the Prairie View Co-Eds were beginning to tap the potential of the local dance band shortage and to fill the entertainment needs of nearby military camps, a number of African-American all-female bands were enjoying enormous success on a national basis. The International Sweethearts of Rhythm, another band that originated at a black school, by 1943 had abandoned its affiliation with Piney Woods Country Life School for poor and orphaned black children and was enjoying tremendous popularity on the black theater circuit--including the Apollo, Baltimore's Royal, and Washington, D.C.'s Howard Theater. Eddie Durham's All-Star Girls, a band built around a nucleus of musicians lured away from the Sweethearts, was formed in January 1942. Durham's All-Stars were already playing major venues such as the Apollo Theater when they began to be represented by Moe Gale's high-powered New York agency in November 1942 (Apollo Theater advertisement 1942; "Durham Band to Gale" 1942; Gale Agency advertisement 1942; "Moe Gale Adds" 1942). The Sweethearts and Eddie Durham's All-Stars also played one-nighters across the South in dance halls, theaters, and military camps. They were pictured and written about regularly in the black press with the same kind of hyperbolic show-girl adjectives that characterized mainstream (white) press reviews of white all-girl bands. "America's great aggregation of gingervating, glamorous, gorgeous gals" was the phrase used in a black newspaper story to describe Durham's All-Star Girls (Yates 1943). Interestingly, although the black press, like the white press, emphasized beauty, sex appeal, youth, and marital status when reporting on all-girl bands, it did not routinely obsess on questions such as "Can girls swing?" which dominated the white-owned music trade press. Music Dial, a black-owned trade magazine, often featured articles written by black female musicians, including trumpet player Doli Amenra (sometimes spelled Armenra, also known as Dolly Jones and Dolly Hutchinson, she was the daughter of Dyer Jones, another black female trumpet player) and bassist Margaret "Trump Margo" Gibson. The same New York Age reviewer who coined "gingervating" segued easily into the pronouncement that Durham's All-Star Girls were "femininity possessing musical adroitness" (Yates 1943).

Within the first four months of the Prairie View Co-Eds' existence, promotional photographs were taken. One presents the brass section in profile: seven young women wearing long floral-print skirts, holding their horns to their lips. The trumpet players face right with the bells of their instruments pointed downward; the trombone players face left, with their slides angled upward. The overall effect creates a theatrical design of diagonal brass tubing. In another shot, the saxophone section, carefully posed in two rows, faces toward the camera with their instruments in "ready-to-play" positions. Apparently, someone at Prairie View (Bennett, perhaps?) already understood the commercial potential of the band during World War II. In fact, the costumes worn by the musicians for their publicity photos were nearly identical to those often worn by the International Sweethearts of Rhythm, perhaps in the hope that the association would boost the newer band's popularity.

In the Chicago Defender of April 17, 1943, a photograph of eight members of the International Sweethearts of Rhythm, wearing white peasant blouses, large beaded necklaces, and long skirts that wrapped around and tied in front, appeared with the headline "South Likes Them Plenty." The caption below boasted of an overwhelming demand for the all-female band. "They are booked for return engagements in the East but are finding trouble getting out of the South because of increased demands for their services at dances and theaters" ("South Likes Them" 1943). In June 1943, the Chicago Defender published on the front page of its "Texas edition" a portrait of the Prairie View Co-Eds' six-woman saxophone section, wearing the same style of peasant blouses, beads, and long skirts. The accompanying text was a prediction of eminent stardom: "The talk of the Southwest now is this Prairie View Co-ed band.... The girls are selected and trained by W. Henry Bennett who also directs the orchestra. So far the aggregation has been heard only in its section of the country but plans a nation-wide tour this summer and early fall" ("Texas Gals Step" 1943). Although it appears that the summer tour did not materialize for 1943, the women I interviewed did recall the band venturing further afield the following academic year and even further than that during the summer of 1944. Meanwhile, Bennett prepared for this expansion by focusing on recruitment.

More professional, experienced players were needed if the Prairie View Co-Eds were going to compete on the national scale. Bennett, who had attended Wiley College, home of the famous Wiley Collegians, drew on his collegial connections for leads on female players. Saxophonist-turned-trombonist Margaret Bradshaw had come from a small high school in Denison, Texas, where two Wiley alumni, Walter Duncan and Conrad Johnson, served as band directors and music teachers in addition to teaching other subjects. When Bennett communicated with his colleagues in Denison, he received some fortuitous news. Not only were there three outstanding female players preparing to graduate from Terrell High, but all three were regular members of a local co-ed swing band, playing alongside their teachers for proms and dances in and around Denison. They were two trumpet players and a drummer.

The Terrell High Contingent

When Clora Bryant turned sixteen on May 30, 1943, her prospects were taking a turn for the better. The previous year, her world had nearly collapsed. Her father, who had raised her and her two brothers alone after the death of her mother in 1930, had been falsely accused by some white men of stealing a can of paint. For this he was assaulted, sent out of Denison, and warned not to come back. Bryant spent many anxious months living with relatives under less-than-ideal conditions, having already been separated from her brothers because of the war. Her brother Mel had gone to California to join the U. S. Marines. Her older brother, Fred, had been drafted into the army in the summer of 1941. After Fred's departure, Bryant picked up the trumpet he left behind and learned to play it, hoping to join the new marching band that was going to be instituted at Terrell High when school started in September. With the catastrophe of her father being thrown out of town and not knowing whether she would ever see him again, Bryant poured herself into school activities, especially music. She ran errands and babysat for her band teacher, Conrad Johnson, in exchange for private trumpet lessons. Soon, in addition to playing in the school marching band, she was a member of the municipal band. She also played in a swing band with her teachers and classmates. By the time her father finally secured the protection of an influential politician and returned to Denison (after nearly a year of exile), Bryant had become a highly skilled and versatile trumpet player. She played a variety of genres, including marching band, classical, and swing. In the jazz idiom, she invented her own solos and could reproduce famous solos from records (a valuable skill for dance band musicians of the time). As her senior year drew to a close, she received scholarship offers from Bennett College in North Carolina and Oberlin College in Ohio (Bryant 1990a, 1990b, 1993a, 1993b, 1998, n.d.).(4)

And then came a third offer. Bryant easily recalled the details leading up to that pivotal decision. "My band teacher who had taught me trumpet, Conrad Johnson, he knew the band director at Prairie View College. He told Mr. Bennett about me on account that they had this girl band. And so when it came time for me to make up my mind for where I was going to go, they told me that there was an opening at Prairie View in this band." There were no scholarships available, but Bryant was not easily discouraged. "I said, `If there's this girl band there and I can play my horn, that's where I was going to go!' So I turned down Bennett and Oberlin and went on to Prairie View because I wanted to play in the band. My brother [Fred] was in the service, and he said I could get his allotment money. He would put me through school" (Bryant 1990b).

With the promise of her brother's financial help and the money she would make working in the band on weekends, Bryant could go to Prairie View and continue playing a range of musical styles that included swing and jazz. If she had gone to Bennett or Oberlin, she would have had a scholarship, but her musical education would have been in the European classical tradition only. Already engrossed in jazz as a fan, student, and player, Bryant knew that this was the music she wanted to pursue. She also knew that opportunities for African Americans in the classical music field were scarce, if not impossible to find. A black female trumpet player would have a difficult time establishing a career in jazz; but attempting to blaze trails in the field of classical music would have been an additional hurdle--what Jon Michael Spencer (1997, 35) calls "crossing the essentialist color line" (performing in a genre widely thought to require characteristics that were essentially white and European). These prejudices continue to present uphill battles for many classically trained African-American musicians. One can imagine how difficult this career choice would have been in the years before the Civil Rights movement and before symphonies implemented such practices as blind auditions (playing behind a screen so that the judges, in theory, will base their rating on skill alone). The battlefield would have been especially steep for an African-American woman who had already crossed what might be called the "essentialist gender line" by playing the trumpet, an instrument commonly associated with men.

Fortunately, choosing jazz as a performance goal was no sacrifice for Bryant: at the same moment she was looking for a college where she could pursue her musical aspirations and a college degree, Prairie View College was looking for a female trumpet player who could improvise. As second trumpet in the Prairie View Co-Eds, Bryant became a vital player, esteemed for her ability to dazzle audiences with her own improvised solos and her note-for-note, nuance-perfect renderings of famous solos of Harry James, Dud Bascomb, and other trumpet soloists then popular.

Trumpet player Elizabeth Thomas (now Smith) was also a senior at Terrell High the spring of 1943. She expected to play in the local dance band that summer and then, in September, go to Wiley College in Marshall, Texas, to further her education. To her knowledge, there was no band in which she could play at Wiley. But the music department had a good reputation, and her impressive band teachers, as Wiley alumni, were living proof of the college's merits. But then, as she recalled, "Will Henry Bennett heard of the three musicians in Denison. After he contacted our parents and we all discussed it, we all decided that we wanted to go to Prairie View." As with Bryant, the deciding factor for Thomas in choosing Prairie View was the chance to play with the all-girl swing band. The opportunity to travel on weekends to play professional jobs was enticing both in terms of invaluable practical experience and high adventure. "We could continue our music like we had been taught," she explained. "And it was an experience for us" (Smith 1997).

And then there was the prospect of earning some money. "It was pretty good for us," Thomas elaborated. "We were able to pay some of our tuition, you see. We had to join the union [American Federation of Musicians], and each year, the salary would increase.... That really did help our parents out a whole lot with our tuition" (Smith 1997).

"The band is the only way that I had of trying to put myself through school," emphasized Helen Cole, the third Terrell High graduate who chose Prairie View that year in order to play with the Co-Eds. Cole began playing the French horn in her high school band but encountered a problem when her class was trying to put on a show. "I started playing drums on a dare," she explained. "I was the president of the class. And I was putting on a program. The program had to consist of kids in my immediate class, see? And it was a musical and we had [to have] like the drums, piano.... We had everybody in our class but the drummer. So I had to appoint somebody to play the drums in my class." The actual drummer for the school band was in another class, but his brother was in Cole's class, so she decided to appoint him. "I said, `Well, since you live together you should be able to learn how to play.' But he said he was not going to do it. And so I said, `Well, let me show you how.' And then I just sat down and started playing. Then the teacher said, `Helen, you should play.' And I said, `Oh no, no, no. I can't do that.' And so he said, `Yes, you will. You'll do alright.' I said, `No, no, no, no.' Well, he made me play anyway. So that's really how I started" (Cole 1997). With the encouragement of the music teacher, she survived the program and discovered that she enjoyed playing the drums so much that she did not want to stop. Now, the opportunity to play drums in the Prairie View Co-Eds made it possible for the daughter of a widowed domestic worker to enter college and pursue a business degree.

"Somehow, I really don't know how, I was in contact with Mr. Bennett. I don't remember that part. But, evidently, he knew that he was getting a drummer. They didn't have a female drummer when I went down there." Like Bryant and Thomas, Cole had already gained an invaluable dance band education by playing in a swing band with her teachers. When she arrived at Prairie View, it was soon clear to Bennett that Cole was a much more experienced dance band drummer than the male drummer who was playing with what remained of the Prairie View Collegians. "They had a boy that played at them, but I had experience with playing because I played all the summer before I went to college. So I played with the boys sometimes" (Cole 1997). In three short years, Prairie View College had gone from a place where the Dean of Women considered it inappropriate for a young woman to play in an all-male dance band to a place where the female drummer from the all-girl band was often asked to sit in with the men and pick up the beat.

The 1943 Co-Eds

The students who came to join the Prairie View Co-Eds in the fall of 1943 had a different relationship to the band than those who had played the previous year. Unlike the earlier musicians, who were on campus when the band was formed, many of the new band members were drawn to the Texas college, in part, because of the all-girl dance band. Some, like the Terrell High contingent, had been recruited especially for the band. In this way, the character of the band was changing from an extracurricular activity to a training ground that attracted professionally inclined musicians.

The May 1944 Prairie View Bulletin reflected this change in university attitude toward female musicians: "In an attempt to widen the scope of job opportunities Prairie View takes advantage of even hobbies as a possible means of making an honest living. Thus the famous all girl orchestra--`The Co-Eds'--are encouraged to develop into the best aggregation of its kind in America" (Untitled column 1944, 5).

"That was just what I always wanted to do," said Ernest Mae Crafton (now Miller), a tenor saxophone player from Austin, Texas. "I know I used to sign autograph books in high school [that] I wanted to be an orchestra leader, but the closest I could get was performing in one." Crafton's inspiration had been sparked, in part, by attending a performance of the International Sweethearts of Rhythm when she was a child. In fact, her first offer to play in an all-girl band came immediately after that memorable Sweethearts performance--a little too immediately for her to be able to accept, as she was only eleven. After the concert, Crafton had been invited to play the piano for Dr. Laurence C. Jones, founder of both the band and the Mississippi school where the band was based. Crafon recalls:

   And he talked to my mother and all, and he said he'd like to take me to
   Piney Woods, Mississippi, and he wanted me to play Spanish guitar. You
   know, they were going to teach me to do this! And I couldn't get any kind
   of positive reaction from my mama.... Oh, I just cried and I really wanted
   to go with them. I didn't have much sense, and I was just a little kid. And
   mama didn't know, you know. He seemed like a real nice man, which I'm sure
   he was, but it was kind of risky to just jump up and leave!" (Miller 1993b)

Instead, Crafton finished junior high and entered high school, where she learned to play a "mean" tenor saxophone in the school band. As graduation approached in that spring of 1943, the all-girl dance band at Prairie View College seemed a fine prospect to Crafton, as well as to her mother and grandmother. "When I went to Prairie View, they were happy for me to play with the band. They didn't have any objections to me being a jazz musician or playing in an orchestra and all. It was nice, then, after I got grown enough" (Miller 1993b). Bennett shifted her from tenor to baritone saxophone, where she spent two years producing a rich foundation for the Co-Eds' six-person saxophone section.

Not all parents were agreeable to the idea of their college daughters spending weekends on bandstands in nightclubs and dance halls. For many African-American families, being able to send a daughter to college meant improving her life chances in a social structure that placed black women at the very bottom. Most African-American women expected to work, but the relative protection of a college education could afford dignified options, such as teaching or nursing. Opportunities for black women were expanding during World War II, and the hopes that black families invested in college-educated daughters grew accordingly. Not only were black college women expected to liberate themselves from menial labor and to achieve or maintain a hard-won place in the black middle class, but they were also often expected to return to their communities after graduation to share their skills and "lift the race." As the author of a 1948 article on women in black colleges put it, "Perhaps it is in the area of community leadership where the responsibilities of the Negro college woman are largest" (Player 1992, 250). For a number of reasons, playing in nightclubs and military camps in an all-girl jazz band was not always seen as the appropriate image to accompany these crucial hopes for safer, more dignified lives for black daughters.

Margaret Bradshaw's parents and grandparents were among those who strongly disliked the idea of a college woman in the family playing in a dance band. "We played army bases," said Bradshaw. In contrast, when she lived at home, she was not even allowed to wait at a bus stop if soldiers were standing there. "I remember we played [an army base] in San Antonio.... And we played a nightclub in Dallas. We did many engagements. We were away from school quite a bit. That was another thing that my folks didn't like" (Bradshaw 1997).

Prairie View sent chaperons with the band to protect the young women, to regulate their behavior so it was consistent with college policies, to present a respectable impression of life at Prairie View College to off-campus audiences, and to set the minds of parents at ease. The rules on campus, as with most southern black colleges of the time, were quite strict, especially with regard to the separation of men and women. Saxophonist Bettye Bradley recalled that she was briefly suspended from the band for hugging a soldier after a concert. She had grown up with the young man in Alto, Texas, and when she saw him in his uniform in that Dallas audience, a hug seemed appropriate: "I had known him all my life. He was my girlfriend's brother. My best friend's brother. I had been around him all my life. What was I supposed to do? Run up there and shake his damn hand?" The chaperon's response? "That wasn't behavior becoming to a lady" (Kimbrough 1997). Bradley was soon allowed back in the band, but the message was clear. Co-Eds had to adhere to a certain standard of behavior: in their free time on the road, the musicians could only go out in groups, there was no one-on-one dating, and there was very little fraternizing with the soldiers except from the bandstand. But for those, like Margaret Bradshaw, accustomed to even stricter rules, the band rules were not hard to accept:

   Oh, it was beautiful. You know, I was young, we were all single and we were
   so popular. I got loads of letters from soldiers who had heard us play, and
   it was just that kind of excitement. For a young girl, it was virtually
   remarkable. I came from a country town where the only time I could leave
   home to go anywhere was with my cousins who were boys. So that was really
   something. (Bradshaw 1997)

Then one night, as the band played a nightclub in Dallas, Bradshaw's father appeared to see for himself what this time-consuming extracurricular activity was all about. By this time the band's repertoire included many blues, jazz, and dance tunes of the day--Count Basie's "One O'Clock Jump," Erskine Hawkins' "Tuxedo Junction"--not "feminized" versions, such as the style played by the famous all-white female Hour of Charm radio orchestra led by Phil Spitalny, but versions played as close as possible to the styles of the famous jazz and swing bands that recorded the tunes. The Chicago Defender noted that the band played Erskine Hawkins' "Don't Cry Baby" at a USO in Lawton, Oklahoma, so well "that they had to repeat it several times" ("Prairie View Girls' Band" 1943). Bradshaw's father was not pleased with these accomplishments: "He was really astonished at my playing that kind of music, probably blues or something. And I was learning how to drink, and I had a cup of something set down beside the bandstand and he didn't like that. So I guess when he came back--my mother and dad were separated--I think they must have gotten together and decided that I would not be in the band anymore." Bradshaw speculated that her father "just didn't think that orchestra life for a girl was what he wanted for his daughter. And neither did my mother" (Bradshaw 1997).

The heartbreak of losing her band membership intensified when Bradshaw learned that the Prairie View Co-Eds planned to embark on a cross-country tour that summer that would culminate at New York's Apollo Theater. "I didn't go to New York with them," she lamented, but the summer tour of 1944 still worked to her advantage. "I was so upset because they were going to New York to play at the Apollo and I was no longer with them. And I could have been with them. My folks wouldn't let me get back in it. They promised that if I would be calm, that I could go to New York City and work on my master's degree. And they held up their word." After graduation, Bradshaw finally got her trip to New York, where she earned a master's degree in music and music education at Columbia University.

Co-Eds on the Road

Margaret Grigsby had already graduated when the band's accelerated professional engagements began, but because she was still in the vicinity--she taught for a year in nearby Goose Creek, Texas, before going to medical school--she continued to play with the Co-Eds: "I think it was the year [after my senior year] when they decided that we would go on tour around different places in the country." Newspaper reviews and memories of other musicians confirm that it was the 1943-44 academic year, after her graduation. "They decided in order to get us accustomed to playing before large groups, that when they brought a group to Houston to play for a big dance, we would play at the intermission" (Grigsby 1997a). The long list of big names for whom the Prairie View Co-Eds played intermissions included singer Ella Fitzgerald and former Ellington trumpet player Cootie Williams, who was at that time leading his own popular band. Helen Cole (1997) recalled that the band played intermissions for an appearance by prize fighter Joe Louis. At some point, the Co-Eds played a battle of the bands with Eddie Durham's All-Star Girls Band, a date well remembered by Durham trumpeter Thelma Lewis (1994): "They beat us, though! [The Prairie View Co-Eds] had a better band."

Clora Bryant (1990b) remembered many celebrity intermissions at Houston's Civic Auditorium during this time period, as well as other Houston locales, including the Down Town Grill and the El Dorado: "At the Civic Auditorium we played intermissions behind a lot of the big bands. We played behind the original Ink Spots. And at the time, Joe Louis's wife, Marva Louis, was singing with a band called Mattole's. We played intermission for that group. And we played intermission for King Kolax's big band--he was a trumpet player."

As the musicians began to travel regularly, spending weekends away, and rubbing shoulders with celebrities, their status on campus sky-rocketed. Argie Mae Edwards laughed as she remembered how the young female professors would beg the musicians to request them as chaperons: "The professors who weren't married, they liked to go with us too, you know. And they would ask us, `Girls, where are you going this weekend?' We would say, `Oh, we're going to San Antonio.' They'd say, `Oh yeah? I sure would like to go.'" The musicians would then confer and advise Bennett on worthy chaperons. Those who did not "act right," in the judgment of the Co-Eds, were not likely to be asked again. "We'd say, `Don't take her. Don't take this one.' You know. And so we almost had the run of the dormitories if there was a professor living in there because she would want to go with us on weekends! Oh sure, yes sir. We were important people on the campus" (Medearis 1997).

The Prairie View Co-Eds were quickly becoming important people in the eyes of soldiers at nearby bases, as well. December 1943 was the first of a series of Christmas vacations that the all-female band would spend performing for military audiences. "We would never have a chance to spend Christmas with our parents," recalled Elizabeth Thomas, "because we would be entertaining the soldiers. Well, we would spend a few days before the holidays with our parents, but on Christmas day we wouldn't spend any time with them. We had fun entertaining the soldiers, and they would look forward to seeing us. There would be quite a few of them that were from Prairie View" (Smith 1997).

The repertoire of the band grew rapidly, a necessity in light of such frequent performances. Margaret Grigsby (1997a) recalled: "We did `Star Dust,' which was popular with the students, and the `One O'Clock Jump,' most of the songs that were popular during that time, well, we played them. A couple of blues songs. `Pistol Packin' Mama.' A couple of Count Basie numbers, I can't remember the name of them right now. But we played just about everything--just about any of the war-time songs you can think of, we were playing them. Because that's what people wanted to hear. And they wanted to hear things they could dance to, as well." Argie Mae Edwards (Medearis 1997) also remembered, "`Down for Double.' I think about that song now, because we'd always start off with `Down for Double.' It was a peppy, you know, jazz song. Then we did a lot of other jazz music." She remembered, in particular, Clora Bryant's solos on Count Basie's "One O'Clock Jump" and Harry James' "Two O'Clock Jump." "We had to keep up with all the hit tunes," said Bryant (1993b, 1998), whose remembered play-list includes many numbers popularized by the big bands: Lucky Millinder's "Sweet Slumber," Jimmie Lunceford's "White Heat," Harry James' "Back Beat Boogie," Count Basie's "Second Balcony Jump," and Woody Herman's "Woodchopper's Ball." In addition, some ballads, such as "I'm Falling for You," and "Don't Get Around Much Anymore," featured the band's vocalist, Marian Bridges.

On March 4, 1944, the Chicago Defender noted that the "Prairie View college Co-Eds band is proving a sensation in the South" ("Co-Ed Trumpeter" 1944). Plans to expand beyond the South were disclosed in a feature story in the Prairie View Bulletin that spring: "When school closes in June, do you think the girls will relax and go vacationing? Not these super-energetic collegians. They plan to tour the entire country, playing at camps, bases and dance dates" (Untitled column 1944, 5). By the time school was out, the black press nationwide was heralding the forthcoming debut of the Prairie View Co-Eds at the famed Apollo Theater in New York ("Prairie View Co-Eds" 1944).(5)

An event then took place that would place the "super-energetic collegians" in the big leagues. The college band was signed by Moe Gale's professional booking agency. Gale, a white man and the owner of the Savoy Ballroom in New York, was one of the biggest booking agents of black talent in the country; a 1941 Saturday Evening Post story called him "the most important single factor in Negro jazz" (Stowe 1994, 103). Other musicians represented by Gale included Cab Calloway, Ella Fitzgerald, Chick Webb, and the Ink Spots. Less well known about Gale is that he also represented a number of African-American all-girl bands, including Eddie Durham's All-Star Girls and Jean Parks' All-Girl Band. In the summer of 1944, Gale launched a unique relationship with the Prairie View Co-Eds.

"I've always heard it said," explained Bettye Bradley, "and I'm sure it's true, that we were the only band at that time that the Gale agency booked on a part-time basis. We were with the Gale Agency out of New York for the summer months" (Kimbrough 1997). During the school year, the Co-Eds were college students who played gigs on weekends and holidays, often carrying their books with them and studying along the way. But during the summers they were full-time professionals, playing several "location" jobs each season, including New York's Apollo and St. Louis's Riviera, with dozens of one-nighters in between. Although the musicians were college students, the Gale Agency treated them no differently than any other working dance band where work schedules and conditions and travel were concerned. Traveling in private cars, the Co-Eds covered a great deal of segregated territory on a route that was often physically and emotionally grueling.

"We traveled everywhere," said Bradley, who remembered that the cars traveled caravan-style so that if one station wagon had problems of any kind, they all stopped. "We played for all the army bases, the navy and the marines ... air force ... whoever, because they gave us coupons for gas. And for tires" (Kimbrough 1997). Synthetic rubber accounted for numerous blowouts. Margaret Grigsby (1997a) recalled pulling into a gas station one time with four flat tires. Clora Bryant (1990a) remembered her embarrassment when the station wagon in which she was riding popped three tires just as it rolled into the tunnel that would take them underneath the Hudson River for their New York debut. All of the Prairie View Co-Eds alumnae with whom I spoke told me that it was their understanding that playing for the troops garnered the band enough gas and rubber coupons to make the cross-country trip. This arrangement--and the significant fact that all-female bands were unique in having completely draft-exempt personnel--may have been contributing factors in Gale's interest in booking women's bands during World War II, when travel for civilians was especially difficult.

Among the band ephemera that remain in the John B. Coleman Library at Prairie View A&M University is a tattered press book from Moe Gale's New York offices, instructing promoters about how to attract full houses for the Prairie View Co-Eds. On the cover is a picture of the full band in white blouses and long floral-print skirts. The women smile sedately, holding their instruments in at-rest positions that allow the potential client to examine the instrumentation (four trumpets, three trombones, five saxophones, piano, bass, and drums) and also see the youthful faces of the players. Inside the booklet, the "correct billing" of the group is spelled out:

   Gale Agency, Inc.
   Presents
   Prairie View State College Co-Eds
   All Girl Orchestra
   16 Gay, Gorgeous Glamour Gals 16

The press book continues with catchy slogans and promotional ideas. Under the heading of "punch lines that will help you sell" are a number of catchphrases typical of all-girl band advertising copy of the day, including "Sylphs of Symphony" "Divine Darlings" "A Band of Honeys and a Honey of a Band!!" In addition to the usual confectionary sweetheart-darling-honey theme, the academic angle is captured in some slogans, including:

   You Don't Have to Go to College
   Here's a College You Can Adopt as Your Own.
   For These Darlings of Rhythm Will Teach You
   All There Is to Know about Swing!! ("Prairie View State" n.d.)

The college theme was important to many audiences of the Prairie View Co-Eds. The band often performed at other black colleges, including Tuskegee Institute and Howard University, but even for noncollege black audiences, the college connection was crucial, just as it had been for choral groups such as the Fisk Jubilee Singers and men's dance bands such as the Wiley Collegians and the Prairie View Collegians. When the Prairie View Co-Eds traveled from town to town, when they were advertised and reviewed in the black press, the sixteen black female musicians delivered more than a promise of danceable music. For African-American audiences, the talented college women from Prairie View stimulated hopes for social and economic advancement even as they played popular dance tunes of the day. Like the men's college groups, the Prairie View Co-Eds represented the achievements of black education, and as black college women during World War II, they reminded audiences of the particular gains made by black women at that historical moment. Even labor historians who are skeptical about the wartime achievements made by white women on the U.S. home front generally agree that the labor crisis of World War II constituted a major watershed for African-American women.(6) The Prairie View Co-Eds embodied black women's claims to respectability and upward mobility, qualities historically denied them by the dominant society. But unlike other images of respectable black womanhood available in the black press at the time--serious, heroic figures such as Mary McLeod Bethune--the image presented by the Co-Eds was youthful and upbeat, a refreshing picture of respectable, educated black women enjoying themselves. For black audiences, they stimulated race pride; for the same reasons, they posed something of a challenge to the worldviews of some white audiences.

Margaret Grigsby (1997b) recalled one incident on the summer tour of 1944: "We had to play at Sea Island, Georgia, once. It was the first time they didn't call us Prairie View Co-Eds. They had a poster up there, `the Prairie View Prancers.' And I got mad right away. I said, `What do they mean the Prairie View Prancers? They can't call us Co-Eds?" "Prancers" summoned images of chorus lines, and though the photo on the poster made it clear that it was a band being advertised, not a line of dancers, the substitution of "Prancers" for "Co-Eds" stung. Grigsby had nothing against dancers. Her cousin Blanche Thompson, also known as the Brown Skin Venus, was a member of Irving C. Miller's Brown Skin Models and would be cheering for the Prairie View Co-Eds from the wings during their Apollo Theater debut. She was upset by the fact that the substitution eclipsed the musicians' college affiliation. "At that time, many Southerners refused to call African Americans anything that reflected progress, so calling us Co-Eds showed we were college educated" (Grigsby 1997b).

Although the high point of the tour of 1944 was the Apollo Theater appearance, the Prairie View Co-Eds spent much of their summer vacation traveling a terrain in which lodging, food, and other facilities were separate, inferior, and scarce, where African Americans were concerned. The Prairie View Co-Eds navigated the South by sleeping in rooming houses in black neighborhoods and sometimes by sleeping in the cars as they rode to the next job. Occasionally, black hotels could be found, but Clora Bryant (1998) described the conditions as so poor (one discomfort was sharing rooms with bed bugs, or chinches) that musicians sometimes sat up in the lobbies rather than sleep in their rooms. In terms of food, Argie Mae Edwards said, "I know sometimes we would buy food at the grocery store and then stop at a roadside park, and other than that, when we'd get to a town, we'd find, you know, black restaurants. Because at that time, you sure couldn't go to another restaurant" (Medearis 1997). Bryant noted that sometimes black eateries would have higher prices for traveling entertainers than they offered to local black customers. Bettye Bradley said that her mother always told her she looked like she had not eaten by the end of the summer (Kimbrough 1997). When the musicians played for white clubs, they often had to observe rules such as entering through the back and leaving the premises during their breaks. Edwards summed it up: "We didn't have any trouble traveling--because we did what we were supposed to do" (Medearis 1997).

Bryant (1990b) recalled that the route took them "from Texas up to Louisiana, on over to Florida, and then up through Virginia, West Virginia, the Carolinas, Tennessee, Alabama, [and] Mississippi. We played all the way up to New York and ended the tour at the Apollo Theater, which was the highlight of the tour and my life ... playing the Apollo." The Apollo meant playing the famous theater, meeting celebrities, staying in the Hotel Cecil for a couple of weeks, and seeing the sights in New York City. After that, the band would travel across the South again. Elizabeth Thomas described the return trip to Prairie View: "We would play at the Howard Theater in Washington and also in Baltimore, the Royal Theater. That would be on our way back to the campus. And, of course, we played at Tuskegee" (Smith 1997).

Tuskegee Institute is historically important as the black "self-help" industrial arts school founded in 1881 by Booker T. Washington, but during World War II it also represented the immediate struggle of African Americans for equality in the military. Tuskegee was the training ground for African-American pilots in the Army Air Corps. It took a great deal of pressure from black leaders and the black press for the War Department to agree to train black pilots. Once they were trained, it took additional pressure to convince the War Department to let them fly. In June 1944 Tuskegee Airmen took part in the D-day missions over Normandy, proving their aviation and battle skills, their loyalty to their country, and to many stubborn U.S. racists, and proving that African Americans were capable of learning how to fly an airplane. The Tuskegee Airmen were war heroes and civil rights heroes when the Prairie View Co-Eds played at Tuskegee that summer (see, for example, McKissack and McKissack 1995; Jakeman 1992).

Many of the Prairie View musicians described the thrill of driving into Tuskegee to find the celebrated black pilots enthusiastically awaiting their arrival. Bettye Bradley remembered: "Of course when we'd drive on a base everyone would come out to help. Oh, we had a marvelous time with that at Tuskegee. The Tuskegee Airmen?" She laughed warmly at the memory. "There were thousands of them emptying out that truck" (Kimbrough 1997). Clora Bryant's recollection of the "sight of all those handsome young men in their immaculate uniforms" stands in her mind as one of the thrills of the tour, second only to the Apollo concert. The Tuskegee Airmen, remembered Bryant, drove "the Coeds wild" (Bryant n.d.). Elizabeth Thomas remembered the Tuskegee visit as consisting of "two shows, one for the officers club and one for the non-coms" (Smith 1997).

Entertaining the troops was an activity that band alumnae recalled with enthusiasm, for the most part. Although the audiences were segregated, the Prairie View Co-Eds played for both black and white troops. Soldiers made an appreciative audience, affirmed Helen Cole (1997). "Oh, yes, boy, I'll tell you, they were very good. They were real appreciative because, I guess, you know how that would be, where you don't see a bunch of girls. They were just thrilled. They made noises and everything." Margaret Grigsby (1997a) shared one experience that illustrates the intensity of playing for soldiers:

   It was Fort Hood or the big fort in Georgia, I don't remember which, but
   they asked us to play for the soldiers. These were all black soldiers
   because at that time the army was all segregated. And there were thousands
   of them. And we were up on the stage playing. They were up in trees! And
   when we started playing, they turned loose and fell out of the trees. They
   yelled, "That's what I'm fighting for!" Then, when we finished playing,
   they had all these sergeants lined up and the army truck, and they passed
   us hand-over-hand, the sergeants did, to keep us from getting down on the
   ground. The way those guys were carrying on, they knew we would have been
   mobbed! And they just passed us hand-over-hand and put us on the truck and
   took us out of there.

In a wartime situation where home front and battlefield were popularly figured as separated feminine and masculine halves of a country that longed to be reunited when the war was won, the introduction of female entertainment to male military environments was heavily freighted with meaning. Popular culture suggested that even as Rosie the Riveter did a man's job, she dreamed of boyfriend Johnnie's return. Similarly, depictions of the American GI showed him dreaming of the sweetheart waiting at home even as he huddled in all-male fox holes, barracks, and tanks. These pop-culture images of advertising, magazine covers and posters overwhelmingly depicted white Rosies and white GIs, but exclusion from the picture did not mean exemption from the message that inundated all Americans. GIs were told in subtle and not-so-subtle ways that the reason they had given up whatever they had given up to become soldiers was in order to fight for such things as the "girls back home." And women were told that they needed to be worth the fight. When young women who were not stars but who very well could be girls from home were brought into the military environment to play swing music in a dance band, GIs were reminded of their interrupted private lives and the reward that awaited, resulting in a highly emotional, sexualized, and intrinsically ideological scenario. Grigsby's story, in which officers pass the women hand-over-hand to the truck "to protect them from the mob," is an apt metaphor for the many ways that women's bodies functioned to stimulate the kind of aggressively heterosexual masculinity thought to create effective soldiers (Honey 1995, 94; Sherman 1995, 121).

For African-American soldiers, a performance by the Prairie View Co-Eds must also be seen in an additional political context: that of the struggles of African Americans for the improvement of conditions of black soldiers in the segregated armed forces. In addition to being omitted from mass culture imagery, black soldiers were all too frequently denied entertainment and other expressions of comfort, respect, and gratitude that were lavished on white soldiers. Pleas for more entertainment for black soldiers, particularly more entertainment that involved black cultural forms and black women performers, were frequently reported in the black press in the form of letters to the editor and reports of public out cry and demands by black leaders for more black officers and more dignified jobs for black soldiers (such as piloting planes). When the Prairie View Co-Eds performed for African-American soldiers, they stimulated dominant versions of four-freedoms patriotism, and they also stirred African-American versions of equal-rights patriotism that sought, extending democracy at home as well as abroad (also known as Double Victory"). The "that" in "That s what I'm fighting for!" meant somewhat more than "girls from home" for black soldiers who cheered the Prairie View Co-Eds. "That" also meant equality for African-American soldiers and civilians.

Argie Mae Edwards recalled that although the band entertained white soldiers at times, this configuration was not condoned in the same way as pairings between same-race female entertainers and male soldiers: "Well, the white soldiers would be around, especially if they were musicians, they'd come around the bandstand and sometimes they'd want to play. Well, I never will forget this white woman who owned a club. Boy, she kept those soldiers back like we were poison" (Medearis 1997).

Another tension is captured in Clora Bryant's story in which black women in the audience at Camp Rucker, Alabama, objected to black male soldiers' flirtatious reception of the black all-female band because the dynamic left them out in the cold:

   We played this army base and [drummer] Chico Hamilton was in the band, he
   was stationed there and [trombonist] Jimmy Cheatham was stationed there,
   and somebody else was stationed there. And Chico Hamilton was a good
   looking guy. He was fine! He's an egotistical little something anyway. He
   was a big flirt. It was a small town, and these girls were fighting over
   who was going to go with him. We were playing this dance and we were on the
   stage. We'd had intermission and Chico had introduced himself. After
   intermission we're up there playing and all of a sudden we heard a loud
   commotion. Then this bottle, this broad threw a Coke bottle, she was
   throwing it at the girls. Our front line we had saxophone players and most
   of them were light girls with long, pretty hair. This broad had thrown a
   Coke bottle at the band! It just so happened it hit the juke box and made a
   loud noise. We all hit the floor. It was something else! (Bryant 1993b)

Despite the more harrowing aspects of being on the road, the Prairie View Co-Eds alumnae generally spoke favorably about their summer travels. As Edwards put it, "I never would have had a chance to travel all around like I did--see different things, and go to different states, and stuff like that" (Medearis 1997). Bradley added her commendation of how well organized the road trips were: "Whoever did it did one heck of a job. We weren't just riding around going nowhere. We knew where we were going whenever we left wherever we left" (Kimbrough 1997).

The Co-Eds in New York

As the Apollo opening approached, the Texas musicians became electrified. The trip had been successful and thrilling on many levels thus far, but the New York engagement would mean a number of welcome, almost unbelievable, changes. After a month of one-nighters, sleeping in cars and boarding houses, they would check into a hotel for ten days. Without the need to travel hundreds of miles every day, more free time could be spent taking in the incredible sights of New York City. Most of the musicians had grown up in segregated sections of small Texas towns; most had never been so far from home when they matriculated at Prairie View. The tour of one-nighters had taken them primarily to rustic venues--they even played in a few tobacco barns; but playing the Apollo, the legendary black theater in New York, was the big time.

After changing the three synthetic tires that had popped in either the Holland or Lincoln tunnel, the Prairie View coterie drove their station wagons into Manhattan. They checked into the Hotel Cecil, which, as Clora Bryant (n.d.) pointed out, was in the same building as Minton's Playhouse, where bebop was bursting into existence at that very moment. Harlem in 1944 was an awesome place for the sixteen African-American college students from Texas. The Prairie View alumnae with whom I spoke still convey a sense of disbelief and awe as they describe the Apollo engagement and the days and nights spent in New York.

Bettye Bradley laughed as she recounted the immensity of the experience: "It was quite exciting to us, and I'm sure maybe a little more to me because I'm from a little town, like I say, of fifteen hundred people!" The Apollo Theater could have seated the entire population of her hometown. But the tour had prepared the young women for the Apollo crowds. "We very quickly adjusted to it and did our thing that we did everywhere, because we had played for soldiers. We played for fifteen thousand soldiers at Camp Lee, Virginia--just a sea of faces" (Kimbrough 1997).

A big difference between playing a location job in a theater and playing one-nighters is that the band did not play only their usual, well-rehearsed repertoire, but they also played for all the acts in the variety show. One of the exciting results of the Apollo booking was that the band played for big-time acts and was rehearsed by two of the most famous New York bandleaders of the era. Margaret Grigsby (1997a) counted these rehearsals among her most treasured memories with the Prairie View Co-Eds: "Eubie Blake helped us to get ready with our music and everything, practice with him--and also Lucky Millinder." Pianist and composer Blake and bandleader Millinder were both enjoying great popularity in the forties. Blake's renown as a songwriter and producer of Broadway musicals since the 1910s and 1920s had resulted in his distinguished position as a music director for USO productions in the early 1940s; Millinder, some twenty years younger than Blake, was currently introducing the new musical craze called rhythm and blues.

As Argie Mae Edwards remembered it, the band arrived in New York the night before the Apollo opening. In a change from Bennett's leadership style, Lucky Millinder kept the band up working hard that night, rehearsing the music for the show. Although she could not recall specific differences between Millinder's and Bennett's styles, she remembered being struck with the expertise of the New York bandleader and the realization that "he really knew what to do! Because he was in all of that, show business, more so than Mr. Bennett. Mr. Bennett was our director, he was good in attending to business, and, of course, he was a good teacher in school. But when it came to show business, Lucky Millinder, he knew what to do!" (Medearis 1997).

According to Edwards, there would be four shows a day, beginning in the early afternoon and ending late at night:

   We'd have a show and then they'd show a movie, you know. And after the
   movie, then the stage deal would come on. They'd show another movie. Show
   the movie, and then we'd come on. When they'd close at night, we'd be the
   last [act]. On the show you would have comedians, and you'd have dancers,
   exotic dancers and whatever. I remember when the Cats and the Fiddle were
   singing, they used to play "Straighten Up and Fly Right," and then they
   would have, oh, all these different things to go with the show. Of course,
   we were the music.

Highlights of the band's feature spot included trombonist Jewell Simmons stepping out into the spotlights and driving the crowd wild by singing "Sweet Slumber" in her contralto voice. And Clora Bryant wowed them with her solo on Harry James' "Back Beat Boogie." The Prairie View Co-Eds were a hit at the Apollo, whose audiences were renowned for their frank responses to the acts. Long-time emcee Ralph Cooper once claimed that the Apollo crowd "would boo a dear relative if she was off-key" (Cooper 1990, 155). Not only were the Co-Eds not booed, they were well enough liked to be invited back during the summers of 1945 and 1946.

At the end of the run, the band received acclaim from Ted Yates (1944), entertainment columnist for the New York Age, who hailed the Apollo debut as a notable event and dubbed the band "a swell bunch of gals who are capable musicians." Not bad for a college band that would be attending school again in September.

Mrs. Von Charleton

The head chaperon of the Prairie View Co-Eds was Mrs. Von Charleton, who was married to the chair of the music department. Most alumnae agreed that she was strict, but some found ways of getting around her, especially in New York. As the youngest member of the Co-Eds, Clora Bryant found herself particularly sheltered by the good intentions of the protective Mrs. Von Charleton. "The chaperon and I would be in bed and the girls would be sneaking out! I didn't know about that until a couple years ago!" Bryant learned what she'd been missing when Edwards spilled the beans during a visit forty years later (Bryant 1990b). When I told Edwards that Bryant had told me the secret, she elaborated on how the young Texans (besides Bryant, that is) managed to get away to go hear music in clubs and at jam sessions, adventures that Mrs. Von Charleton would never have condoned:

   We'd make sure she was in bed. And she was a sound sleeper. At that time
   she weighed about four or five hundred ... you've seen pictures of these
   women in history? Those huge women, these queens, and they wore all this
   jewelry? Well, that's just what she looked like. She was huge and she would
   wear all this jewelry all up around her neck and on her fingers and she
   weighed about four hundred. Lord, she was a big one. And so when she'd go
   to sleep, we knew because we could hear her, too. (Medearis 1997)

And so, as Mrs. Von Charleton slept, some Prairie View Co-Eds were able to explore New York's night life. "There was no way she could keep up with us," laughed Margaret Grigsby (1997a). "She did well to get in and out of the station wagon! And we weren't doing anything anyway." Grigsby managed to visit Small's Paradise, a Harlem nightclub, with her cousin. Helen Cole (1997) was sympathetic to Mrs. Von Charleton's belief in strict rules, as well as to the musicians' need to find an escape hatch in order to see a little more of New York than the Apollo, the Cecil, and Coney Island: "We couldn't just be running around, and she kind of kept the band pretty straight until they slipped out." For Cole, slipping out meant the chance to attend jam sessions--and not just as a spectator. "Oh, no, I played. We played. You know, sometimes the guys were a little leery of girls playing drums. But I think they kind of respected me a little bit because they would let me sit in."

Co-Eds of 1945 and 1946

The first trip to New York was a hugh success. It was also a measure of the opportunities that would be available if the Co-Eds continued to pursue an accelerated professional life through the Gale Agency during summer vacations. Despite frequent personnel changes, Bennett scrambled to maintain a full band at all times. Subsequently, the Prairie View Co-Eds kept up a busy year-round performance schedule that included annual cross-country trips to the Apollo in the summers of 1945 and 1946. The week at the Apollo in 1945 was distinguished by their appearing on the same bill with Mabel Fairbanks, also known as "the world's greatest Colored Ice Skater," in what was advertised in the New York Age as "the first attempt that has yet been made to present an ice skater on the stage of a variety theater" ("Apollo Theater advertisement" 1945).

A particular blow to the band's sound was Clora Bryant's decision to transfer to the University of California, Los Angeles, in order to move to that city with her father, who had obtained a decent job in the booming defense industry. Showing no hard feelings, Bennett penned a letter to the black American Federation of Musicians union in Los Angeles, local 767, recommending her for professional trumpet jobs. Margaret Grigsby continued to travel with the band until the week she was scheduled to leave for University of Michigan Medical School in September 1944. "I got to see places that I had never been before, but it wasn't anything very serious to me. I put the horn down in 1944, and I never picked it up again" (Grigsby 1997a).

As band members graduated or pursued other opportunities, Bennett advertised for replacements. On January 27, 1945, the Pittsburgh Courier announced that "four scholarships are available for girls with sufficient musical ability to play in the Prairie View Co-Eds all-girl band, under the direction of Will Henry Bennett. Applicants accepted by the school may enroll in the second semester which begins February 1st. Mr. Bennett said that a bright future is in store for girls with talent for music" ("For Girls Only" 1945). The Chicago Defender ran a similar story, urging "girls with some musical ability" to contact Bennett at Prairie View College ("Scholarships for Girls" 1945). That spring semester, the war ended in Europe. On July 14, 1945, in the middle of the second successful trip to the Apollo, another offer appeared for scholarships beginning in September. Applicants "between the ages of 16 and 22" were instructed to contact Bennett, not at Prairie View but, curiously, in care of the Gale Agency ("Co-Eds Seek" 1945).

Japan surrendered on August 14, 1945, bringing an official end to the combat portion of World War II. Yet, althought the Prairie View Co-Eds had been initiated for the purpose of supplying wartime dance music, a 1946 summer tour was planned. In April 1946, the Pittsburgh Courier reported that Bennett had "let out the latch string for new girl musicians." This time, however, applicants were not instructed to contact Bennett at all but to send their "good references" directly to booking agent Ralph Cooper at the Gale Agency. The story specified that the band needed two trumpet players and two trombonists. There was no mention of scholarships or even of college education. It appears that positions were now being offered to professional musicians who were not necessarily students ("Co-Eds Seek" 1946).

As the 1946 school year ended, a feature in the Prairie View annual narrated the history of what it proudly called, "The World Famous Prairie View Co-Eds":

   When the war took most of the men from the college campus, Will Henry
   Bennett started thinking. He announced for girls who knew some music. That
   was in February 1943. By September they were playing one hour spots on the
   program with the famous Collegians (boys' orchestra). By December they were
   "going it alone." In the summer of 1944 they toured sixteen states playing
   clubs, theaters and schools. The Gale Booking Agency of New York was so
   pleased [that] they booked them again the summer of 1945. Another
   successful summer and now they are booked ahead for the summer of 1946.
   ("World Famous" 1946)

This is almost the familiar Rosie the Riveter narrative of defense industry propaganda, but not quite. The men went to war, so the women pitched in to keep things running smoothly on the home front. But in this version of the narrative, there is no mention of the war ending or of the return of male soldiers who had been "taken" from the campus; no mention of the GI Bill of Rights that would tip the gender balance once again to near parity of men and women at black colleges. According to this version of the Prairie View Co-Eds story, women picked up horns when the men were away; but when the men came home, they continued to play.

At the end of the 1946 tour, however, the Co-Eds disbanded, but the musicians did not necessarily hang up their horns and turn into homemakers. Some, like Argie Mae Edwards, returned to school to finish their degrees. Others, like Elizabeth Thomas, pursued other options. For Thomas, this meant returning to Denison to play with a male dance band. Helen Cole and Bert Etta Davis continued with a smaller version of the band, which was no longer affiliated with the college. For a short time, the combo kept the name Prairie View Co-Eds, and for a time, Bennett continued to work with them.

Cole (1997) reflected on her decision to stay with the combo rather than finish her business degree at Prairie View:

   It could have been the wrong decision for some people, but it was the right
   decision for me. See, it was only my mother and myself. And it's just been
   like that all my life. She was a widow. So when I went to school, it helped
   her. It helped her to put me through school. Then, when I chose to leave, I
   was making pretty good money. And see, I used to send money home. I've
   always done that.

She worked steadily with the sextet, consisting of herself and Bert Etta Davis from Prairie View College; pianist Maurine Smith, who had been playing with the Prairie View Co-Eds but who was not a student at Prairie View; and three members who were not from the Prairie View CoEds at all--bassist Eileen Chance, Margaret Backstrom, tenor saxophone star from the Darlings of Rhythm, and a series of trumpet players that included at one time or another, Thelma Lewis, Jean Starr, and Toby Butler. The combo was booked by Ferguson Brothers, the same agency that booked the Darlings of Rhythm. Later, International Sweethearts of Rhythm trumpet star Ernestine "Tiny" Davis took over the group, and they were booked by Joe Glaser. As Tiny Davis' Hell-Divers, the combo toured fourteen countries and made some singles on the Decca label.(7) In all, Cole spent twenty-five years in combos, concluding with a duo with pianist Maurine Smith. When Smith died in 1971, Cole went to business school to refresh her accounting studies. She returned to Denison to live with her mother and eventually retired from a bookkeeping job at a bank.

After leaving the combo led by Tiny Davis, Bert Etta Davis (no relation to Tiny) worked as a featured soloist in Dinah Washington's road show, where she earned the name "Lady Bird" for her affinity with the fleet bebop style of Charlie "Bird" Parker. Clora Bryant spent the next fifty years as a Los Angeles-based jazz musician, taking part in the famous Central Avenue jam sessions that included Dexter Gordon, Wardell Gray, and Hampton Hawes. In 1957, she recorded an album under her own name, Gal with a Horn (Mode 106). Ernie Mae Crafton put down the baritone saxophone and returned to her first instrument, the piano. As of this writing, she is still playing and singing in hotels in Austin, Texas.

Several other Co-Eds alumnae became professional music educators, including Melvia Wrenn, who was a school band director in Navasota, Texas. Bettye Bradley, who married a soldier she met at one of the Prairie View Co-Eds concerts, taught music in elementary schools for nearly forty years. Margaret Bradshaw taught in New York after earning her master's degree in music education from Columbia University. Argie Mae Edwards taught music in both high school and elementary school for thirty-seven years. When her husband died, she assumed management of his bail bonds business. At the time of our interview, she had been the organist for the same church since 1956. Bert Etta Davis also spent a good deal of time in her later career playing for church, playing her alto saxophone, not the organ.

In one sense, the formation of the all-female band at the largest black college in Texas is an example of a women's ensemble that resulted from the draft--men were away so women filled in as substitutes. It is true that by 1947 the women's band was a thing of Prairie View history; however, as with many real-life Rosie the Riveter histories, the situation was more complicated than an instance of temporary patriotic substitution. Many of the women who played in the Prairie View Co-Eds had extensive musical experience and training before the opportunity to play in the band arose, and many would pursue careers in music or music education afterward. Some members chose Prairie View over other college music programs because its all-girl orchestra afforded them the valuable practical experience of playing professional jobs and traveling on the road, which they were not likely to get elsewhere. Some members would have been financially unable to attend college if it had not been for the wages earned as dance band musicians in the Prairie View Co-Eds on weekends and vacations and especially during their summer tours. Booked by Moe Gale's New York agency and paid according to the stipulations of the American Federation of Musicians, the band was a professional organization as well as an extracurricular activity.

The Prairie View Co-Eds did not passively step aside at the end of the war. The dissolution of big bands in 1946 was not restricted to those comprised of women. Other bands that disintegrated at that time included those led by Benny Goodman, Harry James, and Benny Carter. Like many big bands of the late swing era, both male and female, the Prairie View Co-Eds adapted with the times--it became a combo.

Another important way that the Prairie View Co-Eds differed from the typical Rosie the Riveter story of 1940s propaganda is that the women were not white housewives but African-American college students. Excluded from the propaganda, but powerfully affected by the economic and ideological changes produced by the war, the musicians from Prairie View are a part of the generation of black women for whom the labor crisis of World War II made a lasting difference.

The author is grateful to many people who made gathering the history of the Prairie View Co-Eds both possible and pleasurable. Special gratitude goes to the Prairie View alumnae who shared their memories: Bettye Bradley (Kimbrough), Margaret Bradshaw, Clora Bryant (who also gave invaluable assistance in tracking down fellow musicians), Helen Cole, Ernest Mae Crafton (Miller), Argie Mae Edwards (Medearis), Margaret Grigsby, and Elizabeth Thomas (Smith). At the John B. Coleman Library at Prairie View A&M, I am grateful to director Dudley Yates, Eric Key, Rose Sonnier Judd, and especially to Phyllis Earles Martin for incomparable research assistance.

(1.) The Freedman's Bureau was a federal office erected after the Civil War and charged with setting up services for newly freed slaves.

(2.) Other choral groups based at black colleges included the Hampton Institute Choir, the Tuskegee Institute Choir, the Morehouse College Quartet (which performed for both Franklin D. Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover), the Wilberforce College Octette (composed of four women and four men), and the Howard University Glee Club (Cuney-Hare 1996, 55-57, 248-252).

(3.) For more on black college dance bands, see Morris (1982) and Porter (1991).

(4.) I am grateful to Clora Bryant for sharing with me her unpublished manuscript, "Trumpetistically Speaking, Love Clora Bryant" (n.d.). An excerpt from Bryant's interview with Steven Isoardi is published in Bryant et al. (1998, 342-368).

(5.) A photograph in the archives at the John B. Coleman Library at Prairie View A&M University is inscribed with the handwritten caption "Apollo Theater 1943 NY," but I have found no evidence that the Prairie View Co-eds played the Apollo the previous summer. Most of the women I interviewed were sure that the first trip to the Apollo was in the summer of 1944, and the newspapers called the 1944 appearance their "debut." It is likely is that the inscriber of the photo was mistaken in the year.

(6.) The debate over effects of World War II on U.S. women's labor generally divides into two camps: the watershed theory, represented by William Chafe (1972), who concludes that World War II transformed women's behavior and options and laid ground for the Second Wave feminist movement; and the continuity theory, represented by Leila J. Rupp (1978), Karen Anderson (1981; 1982), Susan M. Hartmann (1982), D'Ann Campbell (1984), and others, who are more skeptical about concluding that the war's impact on post-war perceptions of women was radically different from those of the pre-war period. But even historians in the continuity camp pause when regarding the situations of African-American women. Sherna Berger Gluck (1987)--who has argued for less emphasis on the degree of change and more emphasis on the process of change and who has focused on consciousness as an area of such change--has pointed out that although Anderson argues that "continuity rather than change characterized women's lives after the war" (259). Her evidence on African-American women's lives "suggests net gains" (273-274). Hartmann, another historian from the "continuity" camp, lists African-American women's exchange of domestic or field work for factory jobs as one of the "momentous changes" in the lives of "individual women" (Hartmann 1982, 214).

(7.) Recorded trader the name They Davis and Her Orchestra, the sextet recorded three sides on October 24, 1949: "Race Horse" (Decca 48220), "How about That Jive" (Decca 48246), and "Draggin' My Heart Around" (Decca 48122); and three additional sides on October 27, 1949: "I Never Get Tired of Doin' It" (Decca 48122), "Bug Juice" (Decca 48220), and "Laura" (Decca 48246).

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SHERRIE TUCKER is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her articles have been published in American Music, Oral History Review, Women and Music, and Pacific Review of Ethnomusicology. Her particular research interest is all-women big bands during World War II.