Helen Jones Woods, 96, member of an all-female jazz group, dies

Helen Jones Woods was an African American jazz musician who toured the country in the 1930s and ’40s, including in the Jim Crow South. This could be the start of a familiar story of racism on the road. But Woods’ journey has some distinctive wrinkles.

Woods played trombone in the International Sweethearts of Rhythm, an all-female, multiracial ensemble so anomalous that the white members had to wear blackface in the South to avoid trouble.

When the group split up in 1949 — bruised by the road and feeling exploited financially — Woods found the classical world no less racist. After her first performance with the Omaha Symphony, her father, who did not share her light complexion, picked her up, tipping off the orchestra that she was not white.

“They fired her,” said Woods’ daughter Cathy

Hughes, a founder and chairperson of Urban One, a media company that focuses on Black culture. “She never touched her horn again.”

Woods died on July 25 of the coronavirus in a hospital in Sarasota, Florida, her daughter said. She was 96.

Helen Elizabeth Jones was born on either Oct. 9 or Nov. 14, 1923 (family documents differ), and spent some of her earliest days in an orphanage for white children in Meridian, Mississippi. Upon realizing she was not white, the orphanage no longer wanted her, and she was adopted by Dr. Laurence Clifton Jones and his wife, Grace. Jones was the founder of the Piney Woods Country Life School (now the Piney Woods School), a Black boarding school; Jones’ grandmother, Hughes said, lectured with Frederick Douglass and may have worked on the Underground Railroad with Harriet Tubman.