[Dixielandjazz] FW: R.I.P. -- Peggy Gilbert

[Bill Haesler]

Dear friends,
This interesting article is via my mate Denis King who runs the Australian
Dance Bands list.
The only Peggy King recording I could find was an LP made with her Dixie
Belles in Los Angeles in 1986.
Kind regards,
Bill.
PS: And talking of great women.
Not really OKOM, unless you play jazz on cruise ships.
Two great ladies are currently visiting Australia and both can be seen on
Sydney Harbour today.
The Cunard liners, Queen Mary 2 and Queen Elizabeth 2.

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PEGGY GILBERT, 102; BLAZED A TRAIL FOR WOMEN IN JAZZ
by Dennis McLellan
Los Angeles Times, February 18, 2007

When Peggy Gilbert decided to switch from playing piano to saxophone
when she was in high school in Sioux City, Iowa, in the 1920s, she
faced resistance: Girls could play violin, piano and harp in the
bands, she was told, but they weren't allowed to play wind
instruments.

So the jazz-infatuated Gilbert, hot to learn the sax, took lessons
from a local bandleader. And a year after high school graduation in
1923, she formed her own all-female jazz band, the Melody Girls.

The group was the first in a string of all-female jazz bands that
Gilbert led throughout the 1920s, '30s and '40s, an era in which
female musicians were commonly considered inferior to males, and
Gilbert became known as a strong advocate for female
instrumentalists.

Gilbert, a Studio City resident who led her most recent all-female
band -- Peggy Gilbert and the Dixie Belles -- into her 90s, died of
complications of hip surgery Monday at Providence St. Joseph Medical
Center in Burbank, said her friend Jeannie Pool. She was 102.

Pool, a musicologist who recently completed a documentary and a
biography of Gilbert, said that although the musician had been
worried about her pending surgery, "she had me reading proofs [of
the biography] to her at her bedside" the day before the operation.

Pool and Gilbert had been working on the biography -- "The Peggy
Gilbert Story: American Jazz Band Leader, Saxophone Player and
Advocate for Women Musicians" -- over the last four years.

"She had just a fabulous recollection of people's names, dates and
places," Pool said. "One of the things about the film and the book
is she not only tells about her own life, she documents dozens of
women musicians and their careers."

That's why she described Gilbert as an advocate in the book's
subtitle, Pool said.

"She often went down to the union and demanded equal opportunity for
women instrumentalists, and she wrote a column" on female musicians
for the Professional Musicians Local 47 newspaper. "She was always
calling for an end to discrimination."

Pool said Gilbert's various all-woman bands played "hot jazz, and
she was in the forefront of the swing movement in the 1930s," a time
when her band appeared in a number of movies.

In 1937, Gilbert's band opened "The Second Hollywood Swing Concert"
at the Palomar ballroom. Billed as Peggy Gilbert and Her Orchestra,
it was the only female band on a bill that included Benny Goodman,
Stuff Smith, Louis Prima, Ben Pollack and Les Hite.

"So if she had been a man, she would have been considered one of the
great American bandleaders," Pool said. But she was a woman, "and
they kept dismissing girl players as a novelty act, a freak
show: 'Come and see if a girl can play a trombone.' She
said, 'That's ridiculous; we're as good as a man.'"

For Gilbert, who did her own musical arranging and contracting, the
prejudices that female musicians faced came to a head in 1938 after
Down Beat magazine published an article headlined "Why Women
Musicians Are Inferior."

In response, an irate Gilbert wrote an article chronicling the
discrimination female musicians faced, only to be embarrassed when
her article was published under the headline "How Can You Blow a
Horn With a Brassiere?"

"It caused a big uproar in the jazz community," Pool said of the
original Down Beat article. And Gilbert's response "sort of set her
as the national advocate for women jazz musicians. She heard from
musicians coast to coast thanking her for speaking out."

Pool is looking for a distributor for her documentary, "Peggy
Gilbert and Her All-Girl Band." The film is narrated by another
friend of Gilbert's, Lily Tomlin.

"We were just bonded the minute we met," said Tomlin, who had been
impressed with meeting a female bandleader who "had been there and
been a part of that whole era we can only read about."

Tomlin was among a couple of hundred friends and admirers who showed
up for Gilbert's 100th birthday party at Local 47, where Gilbert
entertained the crowd by singing, in full voice, "It Had to Be You."

By then, Gilbert hadn't played the sax publicly in four years.
Tomlin, who has one of Gilbert's saxophone reeds as a keepsake,
recalled asking Gilbert several years ago where her sax was.

"Oh, I sold it," Gilbert replied. "It was way too good a horn not to
be played."

The former Margaret "Peggy" Knechtges was born in Sioux City on Jan.
17, 1905, and studied music with her father, a violinist and
conductor of the Hawkeye Symphony Orchestra. Her mother frequently
sang in opera choruses.

Gilbert, who took her mother's maiden name when she became a
professional musician, played piano with her father's string and
wind groups as a child. But she told The Times in 1981 that the
first time she picked up a saxophone, "I said, 'This is it!' I loved
the feel of it -- free and loose."

Gilbert moved to Los Angeles in 1928 when she was 23. When her band
wasn't touring, it was playing local nightclubs, ballrooms and other
venues.

In 1938, Gilbert led the Early Girls, the all-woman staff band on
radio station KMPC. In the early 1940s, she worked for a year as the
bandleader on CBS' "Victory Belles," and she toured in Alaska with
an all-female USO show in 1944.

Pool said Gilbert had trouble finding work for her band after the
war. In 1949, she went to work at musicians union Local 47, where
she held various secretarial positions over the years. In the 1950s,
she also played with Ada Leonard's all-girl band on KTTV-TV Channel
11 for a year and organized a band with her drummer brother, Orval
Gilbert, called The Jacks and Jills.

Gilbert left her union job in 1970 at 65, but her music career was
far from over.

In 1974, at age 69, she formed the Dixie Belles, who performed at
jazz concerts and various Southern California venues until 1998.

During that time, the Dixie Belles appeared on numerous TV shows,
including "The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson" and "The Golden
Girls." Gilbert also appeared in numerous TV commercials in her
later years.

"She was always the cheerleader -- 'Let's go, let's get this done,'"
Pool said. "That's what the band did for 20 years. They entertained
audiences to challenge their notions about gender and age: It's not
over until it's over. Get up and dance!"

--- End forwarded message ---