Pioneers

Karen Carpenter was best known for her voice, but she considered herself a "drummer who sang." Karen first became fascinated with the drums after joining the high school marching band to get out of gym class. She persuaded the band director to let her switch from glockenspiel to the drums, despite warnings that "girls don't play drums." Carpenter recalled, "That is such an overused line, but I started anyway. I picked up a pair of sticks, and it was the most natural-feeling thing I've ever done." Later, she studied with Bill Douglass, a drummer for Benny Goodman and Art Tatum. At the age of 16, she drummed jazz instrumentals with her pianist brother in the Richard Carpenter Trio. In 1969, the Carpenters released their first album, and thanks to 1970's "Close to You," they became superstars. In the early years, Karen stayed behind the drums and sang at the same time, but was pressured to give up her beloved drums to sing front and center, “at least on the ballads”.

The Swinging Rays of Rhythm were formed in 1937 by Laurence C. Jones who organized the group to raise money for Mississippi's Piney Woods Country Life School, a school he founded to serve poor and black children in 1910. In the early 1940s they integrated and changed their name to the International Sweethearts of Rhythm. In the Jim Crow South, some of the white members resorted to passing as black to avoid arrest for defying segregation.