When ninety-six-year-old Helen Jones Woods entered the hospital on July 25th, for complications arising from COVID-19, the nurse on duty was astounded to learn that she was not on any medications. “My mother had some rigid rules about how you were supposed to live your life,” Woods’s daughter, Cathy Hughes, told me recently. Woods herself had been a nurse for decades, at Omaha’s Douglas County Hospital, but she “did not believe in pharmaceuticals,” Hughes said. “She only kept toothpaste, mouthwash, and a bottle of aspirin in her medicine cabinet. She said the aspirin was for visitors.”
After retiring from nursing, Woods became a teacher’s aide—she felt called to handle the problem children, Hughes said, and appointed herself “the director of hugs and kisses.” But it was an earlier job that she is best known for. In the nineteen-thirties and forties, Woods travelled the world as one of the founding members of a record-breaking, racially integrated, all-female swing band, the International Sweethearts of Rhythm.
Like the history of that band, Woods’s own origin story is complex. It begins in 1923, at an orphanage for white children, in Meridian, Mississippi, where Laurence C. Jones, a renowned Black educator, adopted her as a baby. He brought her to the Piney Woods Country Life School, south of Jackson, which he was in the process of establishing as a boarding school for African-American children. Years later, Jones would be mythologized by Dale Carnegie in his book “How to Stop Worrying and Start Living,” which told of how Jones escaped a lynching, in 1918, and convinced the white mob to donate to the school that he was building. But, to hear some of Jones’s family tell it, Woods was not only his adopted daughter. “I believe my mother was actually Dr. Jones’s illegitimate daughter, by a white woman in Mississippi,” Hughes told me. “Her hands were identical to his. She was shaped like him. I lived with him for three years of my life. Their laugh was the same.”
A decade before, Jones had married Grace Morris Allen, the founder of a school in Iowa. Allen was six years older than Jones, and she died at the age of fifty-two, when Woods was four; the reported cause of death was pneumonia and exhaustion, after years of relentless fund-raising trips for Piney Woods. “Some said Grandmother died of a broken heart when she realized my grandfather hadn’t just brought any child home,” Hughes said.
Eventually, Helen began to take classes alongside the other students at Piney Woods, many of whom were orphans and disabled children from rural Mississippi. Occasionally, expensive clothes and gifts arrived in the mail for her, raising eyebrows—presumably, these had been sent by Woods’s biological mother. They made her an object of scorn. Once, her classmates picked on her for having a watch, and she threw it into a lake.
Then music changed her social standing. Her father, with the help of a series of music directors, put the children together in groups that toured the country, raising money for Piney Woods. First, there were the Cotton Blossom Singers, and later the Five Blind Boys of Mississippi. Then came the Sweethearts of Rhythm, an all-girls instrumental group. Woods learned the trombone. When she was fourteen, the band hit the road, with members of Hawaiian, Chinese, African, Indian, and Mexican descent, some recruited from outside the school. They were advertised by Jones as a band “in whose veins ran the blood of five different races,” and “a package of music wrapped in the cellophane of loveliness.” They would sometimes cram twelve engagements into sixteen days, packing places like Atlantic City’s Rosedale Beach Club and Los Angeles’s Plantation Club.
After a few years of touring, the school-appointed chaperone, Rae Lee Jones—no relation—convinced the girls that they could do better on their own. In 1941, they went on the run, holing up with a sponsor in Arlington, Virginia. Laurence Jones sent the police after them, and demanded that his daughter and the other girls return. Woods chose the band. Soon after, the Sweethearts set a box-office record: thirty-five thousand people came to see them in one week, at the Howard Theatre in Washington, D.C.
The band, now the International Sweethearts of Rhythm, added older musicians, including the trumpeter Tiny Davis and the saxophonist Vi Burnside, formerly of the Harlem Playgirls. Refused meals and lodging by segregated establishments, the women lived together on their bus and regularly broke Jim Crow laws in the states that they passed through, sometimes covering white members in dark makeup to avoid arrest. Roz Cron, the last living member of the Sweethearts, was one of those white musicians, and one of Woods’s best friends. She remembers passing through Mississippi while on the road with the band, and, between gigs, looking out the windows of the bus at a white woman on the sidewalk. “Supposedly, she was Helen’s mother,” Cron, who’s now ninety-five, said.
The band played the Apollo and rubbed elbows with Duke Ellington, Count Basie, and Billie Holiday. They toured occupied Germany with the U.S.O. and cut a record with RCA, which included songs like “Vi Vigor” and “Don’t Get It Twisted,” arranged for them by Maurice King, who would later work with the Supremes and Marvin Gaye. In Seattle, a young Quincy Jones and Ray Charles once snuck into a club to watch the Sweethearts play, and Jones later told Hughes that the music “touched his soul.”
Woods became pregnant with Cathy, in 1946, and she took refuge in a house that Rae Lee Jones had bought—with money that Woods had entrusted to her for safekeeping. In the end, everyone took advantage of the band. “First, it was the white community that was after them, then Piney Woods, then Rae Lee,” Hughes said.
Woods was also a social activist, Hughes said, going to marches and protests as the civil-rights movement gathered steam. “My mother was taking me to demonstrations when I was about five years old. The sign was heavy, and I was dragging it like Jesus drug the cross. She bopped me upside the head and said, ‘Hold up the damn sign, Cathy—no one can read it.’ ”
The International Sweethearts broke up in 1949. Musical tastes had begun to change, and television had become a major tastemaker—TV execs preferred white faces. Woods’s final gig, with the Omaha Symphony, was cut short after one performance, when the symphony realized that she was Black. “Music had hurt her so badly, so deeply,” Hughes said, “that once she found something that she was good at—nursing—she left music behind.”
Laurence Jones waged a war against the Sweethearts in the press after they parted ways from the school, telling the Pittsburgh Courier that “the band girls had no reason to leave,” and enumerating their many debts to him: music lessons, for starters, plus food and lodging and books. But, eventually, Woods forgave him. When Hughes was eight, a plane ticket appeared in the mail, and, at Laurence Jones’s urging, Woods took her family back to Mississippi, moving into a house on the Piney Woods campus for several years.
“Mom considered herself adopted,” Hughes said. “Every Sunday after mass, she would bring Black kids home from the orphanage to eat dinner with us. She said that people don’t adopt Black children.” Hughes remembered a Sunday evening when one of the orphans reached for a chicken wing that Hughes wanted, and she complained. “Mama snapped off a piece of the bone and put it on my plate and told me I needed to learn to share.”
Hughes remained close to her grandfather until 1964, when she got pregnant herself. “He told me the same thing he told my mama,” she said. “That I wouldn’t amount to anything. But I knew I was going to be somebody.” Hughes founded a broadcast-media company, Radio One—since renamed Urban One—and became the first African-American woman to lead a publicly traded corporation. She credits her mother with opening her mind to a wider world. “Even when we were living in the housing projects, she insisted we go to museums,” Hughes remembered.
“She was so brilliant,” Hughes said, through tears. She added, “My mama deserved to be recognized for her brilliance. She didn’t care about the music at the end. I want people to know she was the epitome of strength and fulfillment in womanhood.” For Hughes, her mother’s legacy of kindness and resilience matters more than her legacy as a jazz musician. “My mother had so many hardships,” she said. “And so many blessings.”
