O Sister, Where Art Thou?
In the early forties, eight inmates of the Goree prison unit formed one of the first all-female country and western acts in the country, capturing the hearts of millions of radio listeners. Then they nearly all vanished forever.
RT says: This is a great story! For a current fantastic all woman band, check out Giddyup Kitty, they were great at the Telluride bluegrass festival this year. (October 9th, 2009 at 10:33pm)
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The show caused an immediate stir, if only because there had never been anything like it in radio history. There were plenty of radio dramas, like the Lone Ranger, that dealt with the apprehension of criminals. But no show had ever been aired about what criminals were like once they had been caught. People began tuning in all over the country. Fan mail arrived from almost every state, including a letter from, of all places, Crooksville, Ohio. "We were especially delighted with the Anonymous Baritone and the Mexican boy," one letter writer proclaimed. A man in the Arctic Circle wrote the prison to say that he traveled up to 45 miles via dogsled every Wednesday night just to get to a radio.
During the show's first two years, a few female soloists with professional experience were featured. Patsy Hutchings, who had listed her occupation as "singer" when she arrived at Goree to serve a sentence for robbery, sang such torch songs as "Baby Won't You Please Come Home Tonight." But she received her parole papers soon after the show began. Hattie Ellis, a black singer who had probably performed in the Deep Ellum nightclubs in Dallas before coming to Goree on a murder charge (she had shot another woman after a drunken argument), gave such haunting renditions of blues standards like "St. Louis Blues" and "Stormy Weather" that the famous music historian John A. Lomax came to Goree to record her after hearing her on the radio. After performing on several episodes, she too was paroled but soon returned to prison for parole violations and was never allowed to return to the stage. A cigarette-smoking Arkansan named Jerry Lee Norris appeared for a while singing nothing but Hawaiian songs, "Sweet Leilani" being one of her favorites. And a group of Goree women, who were rarely introduced by name, occasionally gathered around the WBAP microphone to perform such docile fare as "If I Could Hear My Mother Pray Again."
At some point, one of the women from that group suggested that Goree have its own band. Reable Childs was a startlingly beautiful brown-eyed country girl who had been raised in poverty on an East Texas farm and had always dreamed of becoming a singer. She had gone so far as to take singing lessons at the Stamps-Baxter School of Music in Carthage. But in 1929, at the age of seventeen, she married Marlie Childs, a prominent businessman and former county treasurer in the town of Center who was a decade older than she and lived in a pretty home with a fish pond in the front yard. Their marriage apparently began to crumble when Marlie, who was slightly crippled from polio, adamantly told Reable that he didn't want children. Walking past the drugstore one afternoon, Reable met a likable, good-looking former high school football player from the town of Jefferson named Terrance Bramlett. The two began a heated affair, meeting at tourist courts in other towns and once even having a tryst in Marlie's office when he wasn't there. Reable eventually asked Marlie for a divorce, but he refused.
On April 23, 1936, while Marlie stood brushing his teeth at the kitchen sink of their home, someone standing outside the house fired a .22-caliber rifle through the window and killed him. The police learned about Reable and Bramlett's affair and had them both arrested for "murder with malice aforethought." Bramlett admitted to the murder, but even after a fierce interrogation, a Texas Ranger was unable to get Reable to confess to any knowledge of Bramlett's deed. Still, the district attorney demanded the death penalty for Reable—a punishment almost unheard of for a woman at that time—claiming that she was a treacherous jezebel who had lured an unmarried man into an act of evil.
At her trial, the courtroom was so crowded that some people offered $5 to anyone willing to give up his seat. Reporters came from all over the state to watch her testify that she had never discussed a plan to kill her husband with Bramlett and that when he did say once that he was going to get rid of Marlie on his own, she had told him that she would never marry a murderer. Unconvinced, the jury gave her a 25-year sentence. Reporters gathered at Goree to watch the distraught young woman, then just 24 years old, as she was escorted into the main building, where she presumably would stay locked away until her sentence was concluded, in 1961. She later told one interviewer that she felt as if she were walking into "a living death."
Reable did her best to fit in at Goree, learning nursing skills in the infirmary, working in the main office with Mrs. Heath, and writing a column titled Across the Back Fence that attempted to extol the pleasant aspects of Goree life for the monthly inmate-produced newspaper, The Texas Prison Echo. She wrote about the Goree prison softball team, the best domino player in the unit, and a Valentine's Day party in which the women sat in a circle and traded hand-drawn valentines. No matter how hard she tried, however, some of her columns could not hide her despair. One winter month she wrote, "We, on this unit, are eagerly awaiting the coming of spring . . . and the time we can hear the birds singing . . . a breath of fresh balmy air at the windows . . . rainbows on the bevelled edge of the mirror . . . dew on the lawn . . . the sound of happy laughter . . . a pleasant word . . . a bit of good news . . . a letter . . . a peaceful five minutes."
Mozelle told me that Reable "shouldn't have been with us. We wanted her to run off." When I asked Mozelle why Reable wanted to start a band, she replied, "Reable said we could sing our way out of Goree. Sure did. Said we didn't have to live like this." When I asked what Reable might have meant by that comment, Mozelle didn't answer. (Many times during our conversation, her mind would drift away.) But I could guess what Reable had been thinking. At that time, the governor of Texas was the rambunctious W. Lee "Pappy" O'Daniel, the former manager of the Light Crust Doughboys who had campaigned for governor by traveling the state performing with his new band, the Hillbilly Boys. O'Daniel loved Thirty Minutes Behind the Walls, and he seemed to have a special fondness for the musicians on the show. When he made an appearance on one of the anniversary shows, he gave one of his typically overblown speeches about inmates being given second chances: "If the great benefactor who gave us all we have goes further than that and prescribes the manner by which he can forgive the most terrible sinner spiritually, isn't there some reason in believing that we as human beings should find some method of permitting men and women who make mistakes to redeem themselves and reestablish themselves amongst us?"
I think Reable must have figured that if she and her fellow inmates could create a female version of the Light Crust Doughboys, they would get noticed by Governor O'Daniel and perhaps receive an early parole. (They had, after all, seen other singers on the show get early parole.) At the least, Reable wanted to prove that the women of Goree, the state's most notorious female outcasts, were capable of doing something that no one believed they could do. "She said we could be better than those men," Mozelle suddenly blurted out after a long silence, and then she started to laugh. "That's what she said."
REABLE CHOSE TO PLAY THE steel guitar and the banjo. Three women were chosen to play acoustic guitar: Georgia Fay Collins, a blond, curly-haired divorcée with false teeth who had been caught after a burglary in the East Texas town of Winnsboro; the leggy Ruby Dell Guyton, who had been convicted with her husband of cattle rustling in Wheeler County; and the full-figured Bonnie Scott, who had come down to Texas from Colorado to commit robberies with her husband. Lillie Mae Dudley, a waitress from Denison who was spending seven years at Goree for assaulting a man and then taking his money, agreed to play the bass fiddle, and four-foot-ten-inch Burma Harris, who had pleaded guilty to a charge of heroin possession in Houston, took on the task of learning the violin. The main singers were Ruby Mae Morace, the woman who had helped her boyfriend rob the man at the Texas-Louisiana line, and young Mozelle McDaniel. Before prison, Ruby Mae had done some singing in honky-tonks in her hometown of Ferriday, Louisiana, to help support her family after her father had gone blind. Mozelle, meanwhile, had taught herself to yodel.
They began practicing in January 1940. The Heaths' daughter, Sybil, then a high school pianist, taught some of the band members how to read music. Members of the Rhythmic Stringsters, the country and western band at the Walls Unit, eagerly agreed to come over to Goree to help the women learn to play their instruments. It wasn't an easy task. Reable would later joke about Lillie Mae Dudley in her Across the Back Fence column: "It looks as though she is trying to climb upon the ol' 'Bull Fiddle' and ride away." But they worked relentlessly. Burma Harris could be heard at nights in the prison chapel, scratching away at her violin. And during the days at the prison garment factory, they found time to sew their own cowgirl costumes so that they wouldn't have to wear their standard white dresses for their performances.
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