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The International Sweethearts of Rhythm Project

Background

The International Sweethearts of Rhythm was an all-women big band formed by the Piney Woods Country Life School in Piney Woods, Mississippi in the late 1930s. Founded by Laurence C. Jones, the Piney Woods boarding school sought to teach young African Americans a vocation, one of which was music. Performing around the country, the International Sweethearts of Rhythm enjoyed a high level of success. Although the band officially broke from the school in 1941, it continued to perform until 1949, with members of the band playing under the “Sweethearts” moniker even after the 1949 break-up.

Project Description

Semantic Lab’s International Sweethearts of Rhythm Project serves to help promote the history of this famous all-women big band. It is part of Semantic Lab’s larger effort to leverage semantic web technologies to expose and correct existing gender biases in the jazz historical record.

The International Sweethearts of Rhythm Project is a subproject of the “Women of Jazz” (record| | description) project and falls under the larger umbrella of “Linked Jazz” projects (record | description). Please note that musicians may overlap with other projects, for example The Linked Jazz Oral History Network (record | description), reflected in the individual records.

Semantic Lab’s International Sweethearts of Rhythm Project expands and enhances the band’s information on the web by creating and/or adding information to records in both Wikidata and here on Semantic Lab’s own Wikibase. Activities focus on band members and other figures who played a role in the band’s history. This serves to increase the visibility and discoverability of the contributions of these individual women to jazz, while also enabling a means to cross-query Wikidata’s records with our record data for these women.

Scope

D. Antoinette Handy’s definitive work “The International Sweethearts of Rhythm: The Ladies Jazz Band from the Piney Woods Country Life School” was our initial touchpoint for manually collecting information about this historical band, though further resources continue to be consulted to create the most robust records possible, especially for band members. The following represents our targeted information for each musician:

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Research on the International Sweethearts of Rhythm yielded further information on membership in other bands, which was also added to their Wikidata and Semantic Lab Wikibase records. For more information on this, please see the “Women of Jazz” project description (link).