To kick off Black History Month on Thursday, Feb. 1, the Figge Art Museum will present a video and live program, “Women that ‘Swung’ the Band: Little-Known African American Women Musicians and Composers.” The free event (at 5:30 p.m., with a 5 p.m. reception at the second-floor auditorium) is in partnership with the Azubuike African […]
This week on Echoes of Indiana Avenue, we’ll celebrate the August birthday of Anna Mae Winburn, vocalist and bandleader for the International Sweethearts of Rhythm a multiracial, all-female band that was active from 1937-1949. Anna Mae was raised in Kokomo and played some of her earliest gigs on the Avenue.
Growing up in Compton in the 1960s, Deborah Swan always looked forward to visits from her grandfather, Leon Hefflin Sr. A handsome, dapper man who wore a suit and a hat, Hefflin was a perpetual tinkerer. He had built her brother s bunk bed and created an aromatic tincture, Leon s Foot Ointment. He smoked a pipe and was very quiet. He never bragged about himself, Swan recalls. If he had been inclined to do so, he would ve had plenty to say.
Hefflin was a dreamer, a serial entrepreneur, a breaker of color barriers and the producer of the Cavalcade of Jazz, a trailblazing annual music festival that