Drummer Viola Smith was a musical trailblazer and innovator. Known as “the fastest girl drummer in the world,” her career lasted almost 100 years.
Author Dean Robbins took a trip to her hometown in Fond du Lac County to tell us more about this legend. He’s also written a children’s picture book about the musician, “The Fastest Drummer: Clap Your Hands for Viola Smith!”
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Mount Calvary has only a few hundred residents, but it produced a drummer of national significance. She was born in 1912, and if you stop modern-day residents on the main drag, they still know her name: Viola Smith.
Smith’s father owned a ballroom in Mount Calvary, and townsfolk showed me where it once stood on Fond du Lac Street. He enlisted his older daughters for the jazzy Smith Sisters Orchestra, featuring trumpet, trombone, and saxophone. By the time Viola was ready to join the band at age 13, she told the “Women in Rock Oral History Project” that the family band still lacked a key instrument.
“He had these eight girls all playing piano, and then he’d put them on different instruments, and I was so lucky to be the sixth one. As the sixth one, I was the drummer,” she said in the interview.
Six members of the Schmitz Sisters Orchestra of Mt. Calvary, Wisconsin, pose with their instruments. The group later changed their name to the Smith Sisters Orchestra. Viola Smith is on the left at the drums. (Courtesy of University of Wisconsin’s Mills Music Library)
Young Viola tried smacking the snare and socking the cymbals.
And she fell in love with the drums.
The sisters went on the road in the 1920s as a rare all-female band at Wisconsin fairs and vaudeville theaters. Viola studied other drummers on the circuit and developed her own flashy way of playing.
One by one, Viola’s sisters left music for other pursuits. But she yearned to keep playing, even though female instrumentalists were not welcome in most male orchestras.
So in 1939, Viola Smith and her sister, Mildred, formed their own women’s jazz band called The Coquettes to showcase her razzle-dazzle style.
She placed her twelve-piece kit on a tall platform, with a giant tom-tom by each shoulder. This innovation wowed the crowds when Smith rapped out rhythms at blazing speed. To end the numbers with a flourish, she bounced her sticks off a drumhead and caught them in midair.
Smith’s fame spread as a technical marvel, earning her the nickname “The Fastest Girl Drummer in the World.” In 1940, “Billboard” magazine splashed her on its cover.
“I was doing something that no one else was doing, and that’s what helped me a lot, I’m sure,” Smith remembered in her interview with the “Women In Rock Oral History Project” in 2021.
In 1942, men were leaving jazz bands to fight in World War II, and Smith saw a chance to boost women instrumentalists. She wrote an influential article for “Down Beat” magazine called “Give Girl Musicians a Break!” It urged bandleaders to hire these overlooked players.
The cover of the children’s picture book, “The Fastest Drummer: Clap Your Hands for Viola Smith!” by Madison author Dean Robbins. (Courtesy of Dean Robbins)
“Oh, the girl musicians were so happy about it, because I mentioned so many girls’ names, all the girls I knew. Good musicians!” Smith said.
Smith later toured as a solo act with a spectacular seventeen-piece drum kit. She even studied classical music at Juilliard and joined the National Symphony Orchestra as a timpanist.
In 2000, Lincoln Center for the Arts honored her as a jazz legend.
Smith continued to smack her snare and sock her cymbals past the age of 100, defying our conventional view of older women. She died in 2020 at the age of 107, a hero to generations of female instrumentalists who followed her into the music business.
“It was all fun. Drumming is fun,” said Smith.
A photo montage of Viola Smith throughout her career, which spanned nearly 100 years. (Courtesy of Malone Area Heritage Museum)
