Goree All Girl String Band
US musical group
The Goree All Girl String Band, popularly known as The Goree Girls, was a band of eight female prisoners of the Goree Unit which performed in the 1940s. It was one of the first all female country and western bands in the United States.
History
In the 1930s, while Thirty Minutes Behind the Walls, a musical show involving prisoners from Huntsville Unit played on radio waves, one Goree Unit prisoner, Reable Childs, suggested starting a band consisting of women from the Goree Unit. Of the original members, Mozelle McDaniel and Ruby Mae Morace served as the main singers. Georgia Fay Collins, Ruby Dell Guyton, and Bonnie Scott played the acoustic guitar. Lillie Mae Dudley played the bass fiddle. Childs played the banjo and the steel guitar. The band held its debut on July 10, 1940 at the Huntsville Unit. Three months later, the prison system asked them to be the intermission singers at the Texas Prison Rodeo.
The band performed on Wednesday evenings in an auditorium in Huntsville and its music was played on WBAP, a radio station in Fort Worth.
“Goree All Girl String Band” enters the record as uS musical group. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Goree, Girl and String can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 12, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q5586140. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1940.
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This entry incorporates text from “Goree All Girl String Band” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.