Piney Woods

The International Sweethearts of Rhythm began at Rankin County's Piney Woods Country Life School in 1937, the year Laurence Clifton Jones helped form an all-girl dance band. Jones had organized singing groups since 1921 to raise money for the school. The Sweethearts were not the first all-female jazz band but were the first racially integrated one, and some members had Mexican or Chinese heritage. After good press in the Chicago Defender they toured New York and Chicago, and in 1945 they played European venues on a USO tour.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Old Capitol Museum — 20 mi
  Mississippi's Greek Revival statehouse of 1839, where the legislature voted to secede, Hiram Revels was elected to the U.S. Senate and the 1890 constitution was written, now a free state museum.
• Mississippi Civil Rights Museum — 20 mi
  A state museum in downtown Jackson, opened in 2017 beside the Museum of Mississippi History, that tells the movement from 1945 to 1970 through the people who made it.
• Farish Street Historic District — 20 mi
  Jackson's Black business and cultural center, where Medgar Evers kept the NAACP office and furniture-store owners recorded the blues, now a quiet National Register district.
• Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home National Monument — 23 mi
  A modest ranch house in Jackson's Elraine neighborhood where Medgar Evers was shot in the driveway in 1963, now a unit of the National Park Service.

More markers nearby

• The Piney Woods School — steps away
• Martha Louise Morrow Foxx — steps away
• Wesleyanna Methodist Church — 4.0 mi
• Seminary Square — 14 mi