Peggy Gilbert: The musician and band-leader Peggy Gilbert, who has died aged 102, was a pioneer of all-woman dixieland bands and continued to fight for equal opportunities for women musicians for many years.
Gilbert, who was was born in Sioux City, Iowa, was immersed in music from childhood. Her father, John Knetges, was a violinist whose orchestra accompanied silent films, while her mother, Edith Gilbert, was an opera chorus singer.
Gilbert toured with Sir Harry Lauder's Highland dance troupe at the age of seven, and two years later played piano and violin with her father's string and wind group. Hearing the Kansas City Nighthawks on the radio attracted her to jazz and she took up the saxophone. "The first time I picked up a sax, I said: 'This is it!'," she told an interviewer, adding that she taught herself to play the instrument, then considered an unsuitable choice for a woman.
Bowled over when the impressive all-female Gibson Navigators came through the town, Gilbert wasted no time - an abiding characteristic - in forming the Melody Girls, the first of her many all-girl bands. In 1929, she made for Hollywood and toured the Fanchon and Marco vaudeville circuit with a sextet of women saxophonists supporting the sax virtuoso Rudy Wiedoft in a show called Saxophobia Idea.
More vaudeville tours followed, for which she organised bands of female musicians. "We had to do everything," she told author Sally Placksin. "We had to be the line girls - chorus line - we had to dance. We'd never done it before."
Gilbert returned to Sioux City in 1933 with a boyfriend in mind, but when Boots and Her Buddies appeared on the scene, she said, "Wow, boyfriend be damned", and joined the band. "Boots dressed in an all-satin riding outfit, with white boots and everything, but the rest of us were so poor that we had to back into the dining rooms of the hotels because the seats of our pants were so worn."
After roughing it on the road - these were the depression years - Gilbert formed her own band and maintained it for the next 10 years as, in turn, Peggy Gilbert and Her Symphonics, or Her Co-eds or Her Metro Goldwyn Orchestra, playing ballrooms, supper clubs and for films. The top unit of its kind on the west coast, it toured Hawaii for a year and appeared at the second Swing Concert in Hollywood in 1937, alongside Benny Goodman, Stuff Smith and Les Hite, the only all-female jazz band to do so.
Gilbert was enraged when Down Beat, the US jazz magazine, printed an article entitled "Why Women Musicians Are Inferior", and she wrote a strong riposte decrying the discrimination faced by female players. To her anger it appeared under the headline "How You Can Blow a Horn With a Brassiere". Even so, it positioned Gilbert as a one-woman support network, culminating in her role as a booker and contractor for other women instrumentalists.
Returning male musicians put an end to much of Gilbert's music work once the second World War was over, so she took a job with the Musicians' Union, eventually becoming secretary to the president of the powerful Los Angeles local, and regularly contributing a column, "Tuning in on Femme Musicians", to the union newspaper.
She continued performing on tenor saxophone, violin or vibes, also singing and arranging, while taking sideline jobs in films and playing on television with her own combo, the Jacks and Jills.
After retiring from the union in 1970, Gilbert reinvented herself as leader of the Dixie Belles, an all-female dixieland band, probably the first of its kind. They recorded, played festivals, performed on the Johnny Carson Showand featured regularly on television until 1998.
Well into her 90s, Gilbert was still taking acting and music jobs. She was showered with awards and citations celebrating her steadfast support of women musicians, as well as her status as a redoubtable senior citizen, evidenced by her lusty singing of It Had to Be Youat her 100th birthday party.
She never completed her autobiography, but a documentary, Peggy Gilbert and Her All-Girl Band, made by Jeannie Pool and narrated by Lily Tomlin, is a valuable substitute.
An early marriage ended in divorce. Gilbert is survived by her companion Kay Boley, a former contortionist.
Peggy Gilbert (Margaret Fern Knetges): born January 17th, 1905; died February 12th, 2007.