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Darlinettes Preserve Jazz Tradition, Start Endowment

GREENSBORO – In the 1940s, a group of trail-blazing young women at Woman’s College (now The University of North Carolina at Greensboro) started their own swing band, the Darlinettes. Music majors and non-majors, they met in the basement of the Brown Building to rehearse in secret.

During an 11-year period, the women played for campus dances, USO dances and traveled unchaperoned to out-of-town gigs, including visits to army camps in Greensboro and at Fort Bragg.

The all-female band was a rarity for the time, and even today, the world of jazz remains a largely male-dominated field.
“Back then, jazz was the red-headed stepchild in the School of Music. They proved that jazz was and ought to be popular with women,” said Steve Haines, director of the Miles Davis Jazz Program at UNCG.

To continue their musical legacy, the Darlinettes are working with the UNCG School of Music to establish an artist-in-residence program that will bring respected jazz artists, especially women, to campus to perform and teach for periods of two to three weeks. While the jazz program has often brought in clinicians, this will be its first “bona fide” artist-in-residence program, Haines said.

Having respected artists on campus is an extremely effective way to educate young musicians. Haines said the advantages are three-fold. First, jazz is an oral tradition passed on through musicians listening to and transcribing others’ performances. In addition, the personal contact between professional and student gives the student a goal to which to aspire. The residency program would also build relationships that could potentially help students after graduation.

Groups like the Darlinettes, one of the only all-female bands in the state during their time, will certainly provide inspiration to the college musicians when they visited the school May 2 to witness the changes in UNCG’s music program. The event will also give many of them the chance to see friends they have not seen in years.

Last September, several of the Darlinettes reunited in Charlotte during a get-together organized by Burt Bruton, the nephew of the late Sue Bruton ’47, an original Darlinette. Sue played the saxophone, which was passed down to Burt. The King Zephyr tenor sax was all that Burt ever knew of his aunt, who died in a plane crash in 1950, a year before he was born.

Burt’s curiosity about his late aunt was piqued one day when he discovered four dusty 78 rpm Darlinette records among his grandmother’s belongings. They were recorded in May 1946 at Vic Smith Recording Service in Greensboro. Titled “Autumn Serenade,” the album included 10 singles performed by the group. Among the songs were “Full Moon and Empty Arms,” “Blue Skies,” “Boogie Woogie Washer Woman” and “You Don’t Get it from Books.”

Bruton, a musician himself, preserved those early sounds on a compact disc. The music is available from Tropical Music Productions of Miami for $13.

“It’s a snapshot of another time,” Haines said.

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