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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On July 10, 1940, the Goree All Girl String Band was taken to the Walls Unit to make its first appearance on Thirty Minutes Behind the Walls. Ruby Dell Guyton, the former cattle rustler, was so nervous that she did some sewing before the show to calm herself. Finally, they came out onstage, stared at the nearly eight hundred members of the audience, and in quavering voices performed "Isle of Capri," a simple song about a couple falling in love on a Mediterranean island. Then, with Ruby Mae Morace singing lead, they performed a tune popularized by Kate Smith, "When the Moon Comes Over the Mountain," about a woman alone, thinking of the man who is no longer in her life. When they were finished with their two songs, they stood there, their smiles shaky—and the applause began to wash over them.
WBAP executives did not have to be told that they had just struck gold. Even if the Goree Girls missed a few notes on their guitars or their harmonies went a little sour, audiences were captivated by their sweet, tremulous, untrained voices, and the fact that these women had also once violently defied the law gave them an irresistible appeal. They were quickly made regulars on the show. They played old-fashioned cowboy songs and light, popular tunes like "My Rubber Dolly." Reable and Ruby Mae sang a duet titled "Sleepy Rio Grande." Using her yodeling skills, Mozelle, nicknamed the Western Songbird by the radio show's announcer, performed "Way Out West in Texas," "Riding Down the Trail to Arizona," and "I Want to Be a Cowboy's Sweetheart." When sung by Patsy Montana, the most famous Western singer of that era, "I Want to Be a Cowboy's Sweetheart" was a carefree number about a woman dreaming of living in the West and feeling the wind on her face. But when sung by Mozelle, who was confined to a prison, the song took on a wistful, painfully autobiographical quality.
Just three months after their debut, the Goree Girls were asked to be the featured act during intermission at the Texas Prison Rodeo. The rodeo, featuring inmate "cowboys," was then the largest sporting event in Texas, drawing more than 100,000 visitors over four October Sundays to the rodeo arena just next to the Walls Unit. The highlight of the show usually came when several of the inmates, mounted on wild bulls and steers, were sent simultaneously out of the chutes. The crazed animals would race at each other, colliding head-on and sending their passengers flying. The last inmate riding was declared the winner. But in 1940, according to one writer covering the event, it was the Goree Girls who "stopped the show" with their cowboy music. The biggest cheers came from the fenced-in part of the arena where the male convicts were seated. At that rodeo, Sybil Heath noticed a handsome, wavy-haired young convict sitting by himself on a fence, staring forlornly at the Goree Girls. She learned that his name was Terrance Bramlett, Reable's former boyfriend, who had received a fifty-year sentence for shooting her husband. "It was like something out of a dime novel," she told me.
Proud cigar-chewing prison officials, sensing a public-relations bonanza, were soon showcasing the Goree Girls around Texas. The women performed at the Old Fiddler's Contest in Crockett and the Black-eyed Pea Festival in Centerville, where they rode the Ferris wheel. The Goree Girls played at several small-town rodeos as well as the nationally renowned rodeo in Fort Worth, where Amon Carter, the business titan who owned WBAP, had them over to his home for a visit. Judge James Elkins, the powerful Houston lawyer and banker, had the Goree Girls visit his lake house, where he let them ride in his motorboat and go swimming off the dock. Men were almost hilariously consumed with the band. Truck drivers who listened to the show would drive down Highway 75 just to park by the Goree State Farm and ask the guards at the front gates if they could be allowed to go inside to meet the famous Reable Childs. An Egyptian who was able to pick up the show on shortwave radio sent Reable a bracelet. A bachelor in Wyoming sent Ruby Mae a recipe for chocolate cake, and a man in Waco wired her $50 after she sang "Where the Hilltops Kiss the Sky."
Although there is no way to gauge how many letters the Goree Girls received, it is known that the number of letters sent to Thirty Minutes Behind the Walls rose from 32,000 in 1939, the year before the Goree Girls were introduced, to 100,000 in 1941, the year after they began to perform. What's more, the number of listeners to the show, according to WBAP's estimates, escalated from three million before the Goree Girls to seven million a year and a half later. Many of their fans traveled to Huntsville from around the country just to see them perform live. (Because of the size of the crowds, which numbered up to nine hundred people, and perhaps to avoid any literal interference with the broadcast, prison officials began rescheduling the usual Wednesday night electric-chair executions on death row.) There were rumors that talent scouts, interested in signing some of the Goree Girls to national radio shows after they left prison, were also scattered among the audience members.
The Goree Girls were on the verge of becoming genuine celebrities—as long as they stayed in prison. But conceivably, the reason that they had started the band was to receive early parole and leave. They may have been the only band in musical history that set out to gain attention in order to disappear.
To get out of Goree, the women might have had to do nothing more than charm the very charmable Governor O'Daniel or his successor, Coke Stevenson, who was recently widowed and no doubt a little lonely. It is also possible that they might have used the money they received from their admirers to pay for attorneys who were close to the state's parole board and regularly got favorable clemency recommendations for their clients. Whatever the reason, the early paroles began coming. Mozelle left first, a mere two years into her seven-year sentence. In the spring of 1942 Ruby Mae was released. Just as she was leaving, a letter arrived at the prison from a group of soldiers from Company C, stationed in Honolulu for World War II, requesting a song from her. "If we could get her to sing 'When Johnnie Comes Marching Home,' we would be ready for action," the soldiers wrote. But it was too late. Once the Clemency Bus pulled up to the main building at Goree, the inmate was quickly out the door, wearing crisp new clothes that Mrs. Heath had found for her at one of the Huntsville stores so that she would look presentable when she returned to her family.
As each woman left, the show's producers had other Goree inmates ready to replace her. They didn't want to lose their franchise. And they still had the ever-popular Reable, who no one thought was going anywhere because of the notoriety of her case. One inmate from a male prison sent her a magazine rack he had made in the prison shop with her name carved in the wood. In what was probably an attempt to regain Reable's affection, the lovelorn Terrance Bramlett persuaded the producers of Thirty Minutes Behind the Walls to allow him to appear on the show on a week that Reable was performing so he could talk about his desire to lead an exemplary life, as evidenced by his regular attendance at a prison Sunday school. The strapping Paul Mitchell, one of the more-famous male inmates in Huntsville—he'd been on death row for the murder of a store clerk and had had his sentence commuted just minutes before he was to be strapped into the electric chair—would later say that he came on the show twice to tell his story just so he could look at Reable. After his death row days, Mitchell worked himself into such favor with prison officials that he was given the plum job of chauffeur for the warden of the Walls Unit. Whenever Mitchell drove the warden down to the Goree State Farm for a meeting, he would accompany him into the main office, where Reable was working, just so he could get the chance to talk to her. Eventually, he persuaded the warden to allow him to drive Reable and the other Goree Girls to the Wednesday night show.
Then, in October 1943, Reable was suddenly paroled. Her departure was an emotional event at the prison—she was beloved by the other inmates—and it meant that only one member of the original Goree Girls band was left, the false-toothed Georgia Fay, who took over as the band's leader. It is not known how good the band was or how often it performed (the transcripts of the last two years of the show are missing), but WBAP clearly grew less enthusiastic about the show, especially with its most glamorous star gone. In those war years, radio listeners were also becoming more interested in patriotic shows about the boys overseas. At some point in 1944, Thirty Minutes Behind the Walls came to a quiet end. A band from the Goree unit did continue to perform for several years on Sunday afternoons at the annual Texas Prison Rodeo, but except for a few instances—as in 1960, when the former Dallas stripper Candy Barr, then imprisoned on a marijuana-possession charge, sashayed across the stage while performing the Peggy Lee song "Fever"—the women received only scant attention.
I ALWAYS ASSUMED THAT IN the course of my research I would find some information about one of the original Goree Girls continuing her musical career. Most of them certainly could have found work. And considering the adulation poured upon them during their performances on Thirty Minutes Behind the Walls—the kind of attention they had never before received in their lives—it would have been natural for them to try to recapture that feeling, the same way that one-hit music stars plug away for years and years on the nightclub circuit, hoping for one more hit.
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