Viola Smith: The Swing-Era Drummer Who Played Past 100

Viola Smith was one of the first women to make a national name as a professional drummer in the United States. Billed in the 1930s as the fastest girl drummer in America, she played in all-women swing bands, appeared on the cover of The Billboard in 1940, wrote a wartime plea for women musicians in Down Beat, and spent four years in the pit band of the original Broadway Cabaret. She kept playing into her hundreds and died at home in Costa Mesa, California, on 21 October 2020, aged 107.

This profile follows her career from a Wisconsin family band to Broadway, explains why her 1942 article mattered, and looks at what she said, late in life, about drumming and staying healthy.

A family orchestra in Wisconsin

She was born Viola Schmitz on 29 November 1912 in Mount Calvary, Wisconsin, the sixth of ten children: eight girls and two boys. Her father, who ran a tavern, turned his daughters into a touring act, the Schmitz Sisters Family Orchestra, later renamed the Smith Sisters Orchestra. The photograph above shows the sisters on stage with a bass drum bearing the band's name and home town.

A wider stage shot shows eight members of the family band in matching dark dresses before a painted mountain backdrop, with saxophones, trombone, violin, xylophone and the Schmitz Sisters bass drum in the centre.

Viola became the band's drummer and stayed with the instrument for the next nine decades. In the 1920s the family played vaudeville and film theatres on the RKO circuit. The sisters' big break came in the 1930s on Major Bowes Amateur Hour, the radio talent show that launched many careers of the era.

The Coquettes and the Billboard cover

In 1938 Viola and her saxophonist sister Mildred formed their own all-women swing band, the Coquettes, which toured until 1942, when Mildred married and the group broke up. Viola built an unusual kit that eventually grew to 13 drums, with two large 16-inch tom-toms mounted at shoulder height. Few drummers copied the set-up, although she later said Louis Bellson began using two bass drums after watching her play.

On 24 February 1940 The Billboard, then the main trade weekly of American show business, put her on its cover surrounded by that towering kit. The caption described her as "America's fastest girl drummer" and noted she was featured with the Coquettes. For a woman instrumentalist in 1940, a cover like this was rare recognition.

"Give Girl Musicians a Break!"

In 1942, with the United States at war and band leaders losing men to the draft, Smith wrote an article for Down Beat under the headline "Give Girl Musicians a Break!" Her argument was simple: there were plenty of skilled women players, and big bands should hire them on equal terms instead of letting standards fall. The piece set off debate in the jazz press at a time when many musicians and critics openly doubted that women could swing.

The war years did open doors. All-women bands such as the International Sweethearts of Rhythm drew large crowds, and women filled chairs across the music business. Many of those jobs vanished again after 1945, which makes the advocacy of players like Smith an important part of the history of women in jazz.

New York, Hour of Charm and Broadway

In 1942 Smith moved to New York, took a summer scholarship at Juilliard and joined Phil Spitalny's Hour of Charm Orchestra, the best-known all-women orchestra of its day, heard on radio and seen in films. She stayed until 1954. She also played with the NBC Symphony Orchestra and performed at President Harry Truman's inauguration in 1949.

Drum makers noticed her. This advertisement for WFL Drums, the company run by William F. Ludwig, presents her as a featured artist with Spitalny's orchestra and points readers to its 1951 catalogue.

Pages from that 1951 WFL catalogue place her among the company's endorsing drummers, every other one of them a man. As the Ludwig company noted decades later, she was the only woman on the roster.

In 2018, on International Women's Day, the modern Ludwig drum company shared that catalogue page on social media and called her a true innovator for women drummers.

After leaving the Hour of Charm, she led her own act, Viola and Her Seventeen Drums, and appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show five times as well as on the panel game I've Got a Secret. From 1966 to 1970 she played in the Kit Kat Klub band of the original Broadway production of Cabaret. She never married; her engagement ended when her fiancé was drafted during the Second World War.

Still playing past 100

Smith eventually settled in Costa Mesa, California, and kept performing well into old age, including with a local group of senior entertainers. This photograph shows her at a red drum kit around her hundredth birthday.

Even in her hundreds she could still sit down at a kit and play with obvious enjoyment, sticks raised and cymbals ringing.

Smith at a celebration with friends, camera in hand, beside a table of cupcakes.

Drumsticks in hand and dressed in leopard print, she clearly still enjoyed being photographed as a drummer.

Here she holds a copy of Women Drummers, a history of women percussionists by Angela Smith, a book in which pioneers like Viola have their place.

A thumbs-up at the table: one of a series of late-life photographs that helped spread her story online.

In November 2018 the musician and writer Dan Barrett interviewed her at a café in Costa Mesa for The Syncopated Times. She recalled the bands she had heard and met on 52nd Street, from Benny Goodman and Count Basie to Gene Krupa, whom she admired. Her advice to young musicians was cheerful and blunt: become drummers, not trumpet or trombone players.

What she said about a long life, and what we can conclude

In that interview, Smith credited her health to the physical work of drumming, to giving up smoking early, and to a daily glass of red wine, a habit that went back to family dinners in her father's tavern. She also believed brass instruments were hard on players' bodies, partly because her trumpet-playing sister had died at 33.

It is a charming account, but it is one person's experience, not evidence. Plenty of people live long lives with very different habits, and research on alcohol and health has become more cautious in recent years. Regular physical activity is widely recommended, and playing music clearly gave her purpose and community. If you are thinking about changing your drinking or exercise habits, talk to a doctor rather than taking advice from a headline.

What her story does show is a working musician who made her own luck: a woman who refused to treat her instrument as a novelty and who spoke up for other women when it was risky to do so. The short film below shows her at the kit in her later years.