ASU

Dr. Jill M. Sullivan | INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC EDUCATION

Music School

Excerpt from "Women's Military Bands in a Segregated Army: The 400th and 404th WAC Bands"

Journal of Band Research, 41(2), Spring 2006, 1–35

400th WAC Band

The WAC Band at Fort Des Moines earned the reputation as the showpiece for the WAC women, receiving invitations to perform throughout Iowa and the Midwest and eventually throughout the country and Canada.  With the standard Army band instrumentation, this twenty-eight–piece ensemble provided ceremony music at the fort.  Conductor Mary Nelson told of the band’s typical rehearsal schedule and responsibilities:

Reveille at 6:15 a.m., plays troops to classes twice a day—at 8:00 a.m. and 1 p.m.—and, of course, retreat at 5:00 p.m.  Formal parades are held twice a week.  Two concerts are given weekly, one for the patients in the station hospital, and the other for personnel on the post.  Then the dance band is called out to entertain for overseas veterans on their stopover.  Dances at the service club, NCO club and the officers [sic] club.48

In communities, the band would perform in parades and give concerts in parks, schools, churches, and on radio broadcasts.  One of the band’s important functions was to help raise money for the war effort at War Bond Drives.  On these trips, the band often performed with celebrities such as Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, Captain Ronald Reagan, Errol Flynn, and Dale Evans.49  Community members made the women musicians feel like celebrities by asking for their autographs.
 

400th WAC Band Conducted by Errol Flynn

Flynn

  
The music played was typical for a military band.  The marches were standards by John Philip Sousa: “Stars and Strips Forever” and “Washington Post.”  The concert band played standard band repertoire or orchestral transcriptions, for example von Suppé, The Overture to Poet and Peasant; Meredith Willson, “Iowa;” and Brahms, “Hungarian Dance No. 6.”  The band played show-tune medleys from Oklahoma and Show Boat.  Novelty numbers such as “Little Brown Jug” and “Little Red Caboose” were hits with the audiences.  The band featured its members with works such as Fillmore’s “Lassus Trombone.”  The dance band played standard big band literature from the era such as Duke Ellington’s music “Mood Indigo,” “Rhythmoods,” “Sophisticated Lady,” and “Black and Tan.”50