Sensei Aishitemasu | Hidden Figures: Ginger Smock #BlackHERstoryMonth 28/28 @SenseiAishitemasu | Uploaded March 2021 | Updated October 2024, 1 hour ago.
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Ginger Smock was a jazz violinist, and one of the first women to record jazz improvisations on the violin. She was also one of the first female Black American bandleaders on television.

Emma “Ginger” Smock was born in Chicago on June 4, 1920. She was raised by her aunt and uncle in Los Angeles, in the historically Black Central Avenue community. When her aunt and uncle realized she was a child prodigy, they bought her a violin and arranged for her to receive private music lessons. As a child, Smock was a fan of big band sounds and, in her words, liked to “sit by the phonograph and improvise” to artists like Benny Goodman and Duke Ellington.

Smock performed at the Hollywood Bowl to a standing ovation at age ten. In 1931 she had her first solo recital at Los Angeles’s First AME Church. At Jefferson High School, she joined the orchestra and the marching band, and played with two youth ensembles, the All-City Student Symphony and the Los Angeles Junior Philharmonic (of which she was the only Black member). She went on to study at the Zoellner Conservatory of Music.

Classical music was not considered a viable career for Black women, so Smock took a job at a lithography shop and performed as a hobby at church and community functions. She would later join the Southeast Symphony, a primarily Black American orchestra, and spent the early 1940s performing light concert music before becoming a protégé of veteran jazz violinist Stuff Smith in 1943. Smock had a ‘horn-like’ approach to violin, with aggressive riffs and improvisations that Smith encouraged. He arranged for her to substitute for him at a local California jazz club, which would be her first professional job as a jazz musician. By the time she was 23, Smock was playing jazz around Southern California with an all-female trio called the Sepia Tones.

Throughout the 1940s, she put together her own band, Ginger and Her Magic Notes, and headlined at the Waikiki Inn, becoming popular in San Francisco clubs and known as the ‘First Lady of the Violin.’ She recorded on Leonard Feather’s Girls in Jazz album and hosted a radio show, Melody Parade; in 1951, she made the leap to television as bandleader for a CBS production, The Chicks and the Fiddle, making her one of the first female Black American bandleaders on television. She also performed and composed music for the public television variety show Dixie Showboat on KTLA.

Smock can be heard on the 1946 recording by the Vivien Garry Quartet called “A Woman’s Place Is in the Groove.” In 1953, she recorded an original composition, ‘Strange Blues,’ which is one of her few commercial recordings. From 1953 to 1955, Smock toured nationally with an r&b group called Steve Gibson and the Red Caps; she also toured the west coast with the Jackson Brothers Orchestra before returning to LA to headline at local clubs.
She worked as MC and bandleader for the television show Rhythm Review from 1958 to 1959, and, in the early ’60s, became the first woman musical director for a summertime cruise ship called the S.S. Catalina. She released her only full-length album after, an LP titled On the S.S. Catalina with the Shipmates and Ginger.

Even after retiring from being a career musician, Smock continued to perform in her Central Avenue neighborhood, especially at church events. In 1968, the People’s Independent Church— her childhood church—awarded her a certificate in recognition of 30-plus years of musical service. She died in 1995 at the age of 75.

A violin owned by Smock is in the collection of the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

#HiddenFigures #GingerSmock

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Links:

Ginger Smock plays "Strange Blues" (Video):
youtube.com/watch?v=orWUJ6lffjk

Ginger Smock - First Lady of the Jazz Violin:
stringsmagazine.com/ginger-smock-first-lady-of-the-jazz-violin

The Woman with the Violin: Ginger Smock and the Los Angeles Jazz Scene:
https://music.si.edu/story/woman-violin-ginger-smock-and-los-angeles-jazz-scene

Ginger Smock: laurarisk.com/research.html