By Bobbie Jean Sawyer, Wide Open Country | In the 1940s, the Goree All Girl String Band was one of the most popular all-female country and western groups in America. The eight-piece band was flooded with fan letters filled with breathless admiration and marriage proposals. Local judges and business titans fawned over their angelic harmonies and rodeo sweetheart personas. In 1942, a World War II soldier stationed in Honolulu wrote a letter just to ask one of the women to sing “When Johnnie Comes Marching Home” to get the men in Company C ready for action. The Goree Girls were at the height of their music careers. The only problem was they were all locked up in prison in Huntsville, Texas.
The Goree Girls got their band name from Huntsville’s Goree Unit, which was Texas’ only women’s penitentiary at the time. The girls, who were serving time for everything from murder to cattle rustling, spent their days at the Goree State Farm working in the fields, tending to the henhouse or sewing garments and bedding for the entire Huntsville prison system. Women who were considered to be acting out of line were under threat of the Red Heifer, a barbaric contraption made up of a two-foot strip of leather attached to a wooden handle. Even by prison standards, it was a dreary existence for the former housewives, waitresses and secretaries until one enigmatic inmate named Reable Childs hatched a plan.
The Goree All Girl String Band
WBAP, a Fort Worth radio station broadcast Thirty Minutes Behind the Walls, a weekly program that showcased the stories and talent of prisoners in the Huntsville system. Childs saw an opportunity to appeal to Texas governor W. Lee “Pappy” O’Daniel, who had latched himself to Texas-based western swing band The Light Crust Doughboys nearly a decade earlier. O’Daniel traveled with the Doughboys, using them to hype his business and political endeavors. (If Pappy seems familiar, he was portrayed by Charles Durning in O Brother, Where Art Thou? as the fiery governor who champions the Soggy Bottom Boys.)
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Childs, who played the banjo and steel guitar, was undoubtedly the star. She had beauty, talent, charisma and a Texas-sized backstory to rival a Larry McMurtry novel. She was sent to Goree in 1936 after she was found guilty of conspiring to kill her husband, Marlie Childs. Reable Childs had requested a divorce from her husband but Marlie Childs refused. One night, Reable’s lover Terrence Bramlett shot Marlie Childs through the Childs’ kitchen window. Once the police learned of Reable’s affair, she was arrested and eventually sentenced to 25 years in prison.
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“They’re so unassuming in our midst that we pass them unconcernedly at least six days a week, but when we hear them on the air it’s different,” Reable wrote.”They are stars then, shining in our own little sky above our backyard, and we clasp hands on the back porch to dream little dreams that are made of stardust.”
Singing for Freedom
The Goree Girls worked tirelessly, practicing in between shifts and after long workdays. They followed a grueling tour schedule. According to Texas Jailhouse Music: a Prison Band History, the Goree Girls had so many gigs the prison board debated whether the women were spending enough time serving their sentences behind bars. The band played county fairs and rodeos across the nation. On tour, the Goree Girls had a taste of freedom, riding Ferris wheels and eating real food. But the perks of fame were short lived.
The special treatment was surely a reprieve for the women. But the end goal was always to get an early release and go back to a life outside the harsh prison system. Eventually, the women would get their wish. Reable Childs was paroled in 1943 and nearly all of the original band’s lineup were released over the next few years.
The Goree Girls were reduced to a footnote in American music history. There are no known recordings of their music. . .
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Read the whole story here:
https://www.wideopencountry.com/goree-girls-story-behind-best-prison-band-texas-history/