There’s an episode of The Golden Girls where Sophia goes out to buy a nectarine. Rose, Blanche, and Dorothy feel bad that the only activity in her life is to go out once a day to buy a piece of fruit, but we follow her to the market where she stands up for older people being cheated by the grocer, we follow her to a hospital where she’s a candy striper, and we follow her to the bandstand on the boardwalk where an all-female band of senior citizens is raising money.
I would sometimes randomly wonder if they were really playing those instruments, and over the years of repeated viewing, I decided that they were. Whether it was live and being recorded then or whether they recorded it previously and had the audio added to the tape, you could tell they were actually playing. For some reason, I never went further than that to find out how they randomly found six old ladies who knew how to play those instruments.
Fast forward to today when I stumbled across a documentary called The Girls in the Band. Watch the trailer.
I streamed it on YouTube TV but I don’t know if it’s available anywhere else. It’s a fantastic look at the struggles women have faced to be taken seriously as instrumentalists, but it reinforced something I always knew about professional musicians: If there’s a woman in the band, she’s really good, because she had to be in order to even get a shot.
I loved Sheila E. growing up because I thought it was so fabulous that this beautiful woman in heels was banging the drums and leading the band.
Xenomania was my favorite Brit-pop production house of the 2000s/2010s and when their drummer, Florrie, left to go solo, I followed right along with her.
I followed Melissa Auf Der Maur and her bass from Hole and then over to Smashing Pumpkins when she replaced D’Arcy for a tour and then on to her solo career.
In boarding school, one of the violin players in my music theory class got me hooked on the string quartet Bond, and even though they only sporadically release music, I’m first in line to hit play and see what they’re up to next.
So I do love a lady musician, and I love an unexpected piece of information that answer questions I didn’t know I had. Peggy Gilbert, who was mostly known for playing tenor saxophone but was proficient in 5 or 6 other instruments as well, appears in The Girls in the Band and it’s her, along with her Dixie Belles, in that episode of the Golden Girls.
Peggy was born in Iowa in 1905 to a father who was a violinist and a mother who was an opera singer. They taught her violin and piano, but once she heard jazz, she was determined to learn the saxophone even though her music teacher at school refused to teach it to her under the reasoning that it wasn’t a ladylike instrument. She taught herself and then moved to Hollywood as a young adult to make it as a musician. Even with the sexism of the day, she made a name for herself, developing, organizing, and managing all-girl bands with herself as the leader and musical director. Her groups were frequently the only women on the program and she traveled extensively over the coming decades. After the rise of all-girl bands peaked during War War II, as did many other industries where women filled the shoes of men who were off at war, Peggy went into semi-retirement when the demand dropped off. It was around this time when she divorced her husband, met her lifelong partner Kay, and settled into normal 9 to 5 life.
After retiring from clerical work at the age of 65, she put together one last band of senior citizens — The Dixie Belles. They found success on the festival and benefit circuit in the 1970s, and by the mid-1980s, they were being booked for television shows like The Tonight Show and The Golden Girls. In 1986 they recorded their first and only album and continued playing well into the 1990s until the death of a band member in 1998.
So, thanks to my random internet viewing habits, a long-standing question that was in the back of my mind has been answered. Sophia’s all-girl band was an actual group of talented older musicians led by one of the original pioneers of women in music.
Cheers to Peggy Gilbert.
Leave a Reply