In the early forties, eight inmates of the Goree prison unit formed one of the first all-female country and western acts in the country, capturing the hearts of millions of radio listeners. Then they nearly all vanished forever. Accompanied by the Rhythmic Stringsters, yodeler Mozelle McDaniel leads the Goree Girls at the prison rodeo.
She was sitting in her wheelchair in the dayroom, staring at a television that flickered soundlessly in a corner. She didn’t turn her head when I said her name.
“Mrs. McDaniel?” I asked.
“Honey, that’s Mrs. Mozelle Cash,” said a woman sitting with two other women on a couch against the wall. It was November 2002, just after lunch at the Briarcliff nursing home in Tyler, and the residents were visiting for a few minutes before heading off to their rooms to take their afternoon naps.
“I was looking for Mozelle McDaniel,” I said. “At least that’s what her name used to be.”
“Mozelle McDaniel?” said the woman on the couch. “Who?”
“The Mozelle who used to sing,” I said.
Slowly, the woman watching television moved her head. With a wrinkled hand she tugged at the wheel of her wheelchair and turned to face me. She was thin, painfully thin, her arms like blue-veined Tinkertoys. “I don’t know what she’ll say to you,” said an attendant who happened to be walking by. “She goes in and out. She’s got some senility, you know.”
“I’ve been looking for you for a long, long time,” I quietly said to the woman, handing her some flowers I had bought on my way into town. Then, from my briefcase, I pulled a faded black and white photograph of a group of eight young women, taken in the year 1940. In the photograph, the women are dressed in light tan shirts, brown Western-style skirts, and white cowboy boots, with brown bandannas tied around their necks. They look as lovely as actresses, their skin like porcelain, their hair spilling out in ringlets from beneath white cowboy hats.
For several seconds the 83-year-old woman said nothing. She squinted as if to get the photo in focus. “Mozelle, are you all right?” asked another of the ladies on the couch. But she wasn’t paying her friends any attention. She began to point at each of the young women in the photograph.
“What you got there?” said one of the women, lifting herself with the help of her walker to get a better look at the photograph. “Is that you, Mozelle, in that cowgirl outfit? Why are you girls dressed up that way?”
Mozelle’s eyes remained glued to the photo. For a few moments, I assumed her mind was adrift, lost in a long-ago world. But then she stirred in her chair, and she turned her pale, watery eyes toward her friend.
“We just did a little singing,” she finally said. “That’s all we did, a little singing.” 180405_OSisterWhereArtThou_2.jpg
The original members of the Goree All Girl String Band in their handmade uniforms at a rodeo performance in Shreveport, Louisiana.
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Actually, they were once a national sensation, one of the first all-female country and western musical groups in history. They called themselves the Goree All Girl String Band, and every Wednesday evening in the early forties, an estimated seven million Americans tuned their radios to WBAP in Fort Worth—then a 50,000-watt clear-channel station that was able to broadcast its signal across the country—just so they could listen to a musical variety show that featured the group. The Goree Girls, as they were popularly known, received fan letters from around the country. Their male admirers sent them candy, money, flowers, and handwritten marriage proposals. Some of their fans traveled for hundreds of miles just to get a glimpse of them during those Wednesday night radio shows, which were always broadcast live from an auditorium in the East Texas town of Huntsville.
At the end of the shows, many in the crowd would push toward the stage to try to get the Goree Girls’ autographs. But the band members never had much time to linger. They were quickly escorted away by uniformed guards and driven in a van down U.S. 75 to a two-story dark-brick building a few miles south of Huntsville with a sign in front that read “Goree State Farm.” At the time, the Goree State Farm was Texas’ sole penitentiary for women, and the Goree Girls were convicted criminals, serving time for such felonies as theft, robbery, cattle rustling, and murder.
It is a story that seems almost impossible to believe: a group of female convicts, few of whom had ever played a musical instrument or taken voice lessons, forming a country and western band and becoming, at least in Texas, the Dixie Chicks of their day. It is also a story that has been almost entirely forgotten. Today, when music historians write about the first female stars of country music, they mention the popular cowgirl singer Patsy Montana; the bluegrass vocalists Maybelle and Sarah Carter, of the Carter Family; Louise Massey Mabie, who was heralded as the “original rhinestone cowgirl” when she sang for NBC radio programs in New York in the late thirties; and the Girls of the Golden West, two sisters who claimed to be from Muleshoe but were actually Illinois farm girls. Perhaps because the Goree All Girl String Band never made a record or went on a national tour, the group does not even rate a footnote from the historians.
I too had never heard of the Goree Girls until a few years ago, when I came across a photograph of the group hanging on the back wall of the cluttered Texas Prison Museum, which was then located in a small storefront on Huntsville’s town square. They seemed so strangely innocent, these Depression-era women dressed in their Dale Evans-like cowgirl garb. None of them was over the age of thirty. When I asked one of the museum’s volunteers if anyone there knew their names, he said, “I don’t think so.” He paused and stared at the photograph. “But they sure must have been something.”
Soon, I was scouring libraries, reading old newspapers, digging up Texas Prison System documents from the thirties and forties, and hiring a researcher to find anyone still alive who had been connected in any way with the original Goree All Girl String Band. My search would take me all over Texas and even on to Virginia and California. I was determined to find out what had happened to these women who had been able to mesmerize audiences with their raw, plaintive songs of lost love and bittersweet dreams and the hope for a better future. There had been talk during that time that some of them were destined for successful musical careers after their prison terms ended. But they had faded quickly into obscurity. It wasn’t until I found Mozelle McDaniel, the last known surviving member of the original band, that I began to understand why.
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Almost all of the new Goree inmates would arrive on the famed One-Way Wagon, an oversized flatbed truck with a frame of heavy-gauge metal and wire mesh driven by Bud Russell, the Texas Prison System’s transfer agent who was in charge of picking up convicted felons from the county jails throughout the state. Although Uncle Bud, as he liked to be called, brought along his wife or one of his teenage daughters to keep the prisoners company on those long trips, there were times when nothing was said. Some of the women would just lean back on the hard benches of the truck and stare blankly out the side. Others would be nearly in tears. A few of them had been so desperate to stay out of prison that they had tried to get pregnant before the One-Way Wagon came to get them in order to take advantage of a state policy that granted furloughs to pregnant inmates until their babies were born.
The Goree State Farm was made up of fields and fields of crops, a henhouse, a fruit orchard, a cannery for the vegetables brought in from the fields, a barn for the dairy cattle, and a cemetery out back where the bodies of unclaimed inmates were buried. Inside the main building, which rose from a barren patch of land near the highway, the new inmates were issued starched white dresses that made them look like nurses and taken to their quarters—the white women to one set of dormitories, the black women to another. Iron bars were bolted over the windows. “In these dormitories for the women, the lights burn all night,” wrote a Texas A&M graduate student who toured the farm in 1932 for his thesis, “A Social Study of the Women’s Penitentiary of Texas.” “Many of the inmates spend several nights trying to become accustomed to the lights, before they are successful and finally sleep.”
On a typical day in the thirties, Goree contained about 150 inmates: one-time waitresses, shop clerks, nurses, laundresses, cooks, and housekeepers who had turned into gun molls and madams, burglars and bootleggers. The Girls in White, as they were called, ranged from skid-row prostitutes and dope peddlers to prim bookkeepers who had been caught slipping money out of their companies’ accounts. A few women were admitted to Goree on the same day their husbands were admitted to one of the male penitentiaries. Apparently, they had committed Bonnie and Clyde-style robberies, the husband doing the actual robbing and the wife serving as lookout or driving the getaway car. Other women had gotten into trouble only because their husbands had abandoned them. Desperate to put food on the table for their children, they had forged checks, stolen property, and even tried their luck at holding up a store.
One of the intriguing rumors I heard about Goree was that some of the inmates were forced to undergo sterilization operations by prison doctors who believed that females, supposedly the more docile sex, committed crimes because they had some sort of genetic flaw. Sterilization programs were certainly in existence in prisons around the country during that time, and though I could find no record of such a program being funded at Goree, descendants of various inmates told me that their relatives had mentioned to them many times that they had been sterilized against their will so that their supposed hereditary defects would not be passed down to another generation. “You should have seen the tears form in my aunt Ruby’s eyes when she’d talk about a certain doctor tying her tubes so that she could never have children,” said Judith Bergeron, a resident of San Diego, California, whose aunt, Ruby Mae Morace, arrived at Goree at the age of nineteen after she and her boyfriend had hitchhiked a ride with a man near the Texas-Louisiana line, robbed him, tied him to a tree, and then sped off in his car. “She told me that a part of her life was taken away, that she was made to feel like she didn’t deserve to be like other women because of that one mistake she had made on that highway.”
Six days a week, the manager of Goree, “Captain” Marcus Heath, a stern, six-foot-two-inch-tall veteran employee of the Texas Prison System who liked wearing Stetson hats and khaki work clothes, had the women awakened at six o’clock and at their prison jobs an hour later. Some of the inmates were assigned to the fields or the orchard, others to the dairy barn or the henhouse. Most of the women worked at the prison’s garment factory, where they sat in front of sewing machines, turning out all the clothing and bedding for the entire prison system: uniforms for the inmates and guards, underwear, caps, pillowcases, sheets, and nightshirts. After their ten-hour workdays, the women were fed dinner, and four nights a week, they attended school. Then it was back to the dormitory and in bed at nine o’clock.
If an inmate violated a prison rule—attempted to escape, engaged in “bull daggering” (the phrase then used at Goree to describe lesbian sex), got into a fight in the dormitories, or refused to work—she would be punished. Those who committed the most severe violations were either confined to one of the tiny solitary cabins behind the main building for 36 hours, where they were provided only bread and water, or they received a beating from the Red Heifer, a strap of leather two and a half inches wide and 24 inches long, attached to a long wooden handle. It was, by all accounts, a vicious punishment: According to an investigator who later conducted a study of the state’s prisons, the sound of the lash against the buttocks of an inmate was “very much like the report of a pistol.”
There were always a few inmates willing to risk the Red Heifer. One was caught with a knife, which she had used to stab another woman in a brawl, attached to her sanitary belt. Another woman, unable to give up her thieving ways, was discovered to have hidden a fellow convict’s diamond ring in her vagina. “Cocaine” Nora Harris, of San Antonio, was so intent on bull-daggering other inmates that a solitary cell was constructed just for her. The women who followed Heath’s rules, however, were granted limited privileges. They were allowed to gather in the prison auditorium on Saturday nights to watch a “modern talkie,” usually a western or a love story, and on Sunday afternoons, they could spend a few hours walking the prison grounds, taking photographs of one another and playing such sports as softball, tennis, or croquet. On the Fourth of July, they could go fishing and swimming in one of the ponds on the Goree property, and on other holidays, like Thanksgiving, they could have dances, the only catch being that they had to dance with each other.
To prepare the women for the day when they would leave prison, classes were offered in typing, shorthand, cooking, and even “beauty culture,” for those who wanted to be beauticians. Captain Heath’s wife, Clyde Oree Heath, who officially served as Goree’s “matron”—she worked in the main office, read and censored all the inmate mail, and gave tours of the prison to visiting politicians and nervous ladies’ church groups—was constantly giving the inmates self-help talks about the advantages of acting more ladylike. “I remember my mother would go downtown to the stores to buy things for the girls, like certain kinds of makeup or toiletries that they couldn’t get at the Goree commissary,” said the Heaths’ daughter, Sybil Vick, of Huntsville, who in the thirties grew up in a house next to the main building. “She’d put on a nice dress, high heels, and earrings, and she’d walk by herself through the dormitories just so she could talk to them about their problems. She even put in a flower bed in front of the main building because she thought it would give the girls a greater sense of self-esteem.”
Yet nothing could disguise the fact that Goree was a bleak purgatory for the state’s female outcasts. The Girls in White were cloistered, with little to remind them of life outside the farm except for the photos that they were allowed to tape on the wall beside their beds and the occasional visits from relatives who took the bus to see them or showed up at the prison gates in old cars billowing doughy exhaust. Their days moved at a snail’s pace; the Texas A&M graduate student who visited the prison noticed that one weary inmate had written on a blackboard in one of the prison’s makeshift classrooms, “19 x 14 = 266. France is in Europe. Six more years.” Another inmate spent her free time staring out a barred window at two horses in a field, always ready to place a bet with another inmate on which of the horses would reach the opposite fence first. One afternoon, a woman working her ten-hour shift behind a sewing machine went berserk. Captain Heath was called in to take away the scissors she was clutching in her hand.
“It wasn’t a place you wanted to be,” Mozelle McDaniel told me during my visit with her in Tyler. In 1938, when Mozelle was a seventeen-year-old living in the tiny town of Wharton, southwest of Houston, she and her younger sister had driven into town in the family automobile “to see the crowds.” They met a couple of boys and were sitting in the car with them when their stepfather, “Daddy Jack” Watkins, appeared, furious that they had stayed in town past nightfall. He drove the girls home, saying, “I ought to whip you.” Mozelle walked inside the house, picked up a .22-caliber rifle, walked outside, and shot him eleven times, pumping one shell after another into the chamber of the rifle. When he finally crumpled to the ground, she calmly leaned the rifle against the door frame and went back inside the house. “I shot Daddy Jack to protect the family,” Mozelle testified at her trial, which was covered by all the Houston newspapers. “I was afraid he would kill us.” Although it was clear that Mozelle had spent much of her childhood at the mercy of a seething, hard-drinking man, jurors in those years were not ready to forgive a woman, no matter how young, who believed that the only way to escape abuse was to resort to a violent act herself. Mozelle was sent to Goree for seven years. She told an interviewer not long after she arrived that she doubted she would be able to survive Goree for more than a year. She could not have possibly imagined that her trip to Goree was about to turn her, and a few women just like her, into stars.
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