San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
SWING ERA’S ‘FASTEST GIRL DRUMMER’
Viola Smith, a swing-era musician who was promoted in the 1930s as the “fastest girl drummer in the world” and who championed greater inclusion of women in the almost completely male preserve of big bands, died Oct. 21 at her home in Costa Mesa. She was 107.
The cause was complications from Alzheimer’s disease, said her nephew, Dennis Bartash.
With a kit featuring 12 drums, including two giant tom-toms placed near her shoulders, Smith was from 1938 to 1941 the centerpiece of the Coquettes, an “all-girl” big band that developed a modest national following.
Her showcase was “The Snake Charmer,” a jazzy arabesque with explosions of drumming pyrotechnics.
In an era when the dance bands of Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller and Artie Shaw dominated the charts, Smith belonged to a coterie of female bandleaders who struggled to gain respect for their musicianship. One reviewer called her a “pulchritudinous miss who so adeptly maneuvers the drums and cymbals.”
Smith had created the Coquettes from the remnants of her Wisconsin family’s all-female band in which she was one of eight musical sisters. She favored crisp, swinging arrangements and was, by many accounts, an egalitarian leader who valued the input of her employees in business and artistic decisions.
More than a pleasant timekeeper, she was a dervish behind the drums and found it difficult to conduct the group while playing. She turned over baton duties to Frances Carroll, a flame-haired, hip-swiveling singer and dancer whose ravishing looks were accented by decolletage-baring gowns.
The band, soon known as Frances Carroll & the Coquettes, played at nightclubs and dance halls, appeared in several short films and was on the cover of the entertainment trade magazine Billboard before dissolving.
By that time, Smith said, she had spent 15 years on the road and had grown exhausted by the demands of travel. She selected Manhattan as her home base and won a summer scholarship to study timpani at the Juilliard School. She also sat in with bands at New York’s Paramount Theater as many able-bodied male drummers of the day were drafted into military service for World War II.
She caused a stir with her 1942 essay in the music trade magazine Downbeat titled “Give Girl Musicians a Break!,” in which she called on prominent big-band leaders of the day to hire more women.
With men away at war, she wrote, “Instead of replacing them with what may be mediocre talent, why not let some of the great girl musicians of the country take their places? ... Girls work right along beside men in the factories, in the offices . ... So why not in dance bands?”
“In addition, there are some girl musicians who are as much the masters of their instruments as male musicians,” she added. “Think it over, boys.” For the most part, they didn’t. Within a year, she was playing under Phil Spitalny, whose all-girl band — heavy on harps and chiffon gowns — offered unadventurous material but a steady income. The group was featured on Spitalny’s “Hour of Charm” radio show and in two movies, “When Johnny Comes Marching Home” (1942) and the Abbott & Costello comedy “Here Come the Co-eds” (1945).
Smith later drew attention as a member of the Kit Kat Band jazz quartet featured in the musical “Cabaret,” which ran on Broadway from 1966 to 1969 and then toured nationally.
Smith retired a few years later but occasionally picked up her drumsticks to play with a California ensemble called the Forever Young Band, which (unlike a Neil Young tribute band of the same name) billed itself as “America’s Oldest Act of Professional Entertainers.”
In a 2013 video interview with Tom Tom, a magazine about female drummers, she described a career of few obstacles other than her sex. “One thing always led to another,” she said. “It was all very easy, the transitions, there was no big deal I had to worry about ever . ... I really had a charmed life. Unless people call drumming work. Then I worked hard in my life.”