The Darling Saxophone Four

From The Musical Way Back Machine

The Darling Saxophone Four

Meet the Darling Saxophone Four.

Every so often, an image or story stumbles across my feed that’s curious or unique enough (or somehow makes us go hmmmm) that we like to feature it here. Usually, we’ll spend a little time doing some background work to try to paint a whole story.

This time though… well, the Darling Saxophone Four (also known as the Charming Melody Maids or the Darling Saxophone Girls) don’t actually have much history.

And so we’re left with our imagination.

From what I gathered, they performed on the Vaudeville Circuit from around 1915 to 1921. They appear to be from the north west, some of their first shows were in Portland, Oregon. Are they actual sisters? That’s unclear. An advertisement for a show at a Masonic Home in Tacoma lists them as Seze, Lois, Medora and Phyllis Darling but that could just be stage names.

There’s some Darlings listed in the Tacoma census from 1910, but named Mary and Addie, and nothing about Saxophones. A 1916 newspaper article about a performance in La Crosse, Wisconsin wrote that “Four happy young ladies in pretty costumes and with pretty faces… gave fifteen minutes or so of entertainment that seemed to strike the La Crosse Theater Audience just right.”

This was a time just before jazz, so the group was often referred to as playing classical or popular music. And saxophones were certainly not a popular instrument at the time, to say nothing of FOUR saxophone playing women. And nobody was going around playing a bass saxophone!

Anyway, there they were playing in Buffalo, Chicago, Boston and St. Louis. Four women on the road, one hundred years ago, playing music and instruments that few had ever heard before and then, poof, right around 1921 or so, they stopped.

I’ll bet they never would have imagined that 100 years later, all you dear readers would be re-introduced to the Darling Saxophone Four. Even though we know so little, I can only imagine what they must have sounded like, how unique and unusual for their time.

Maybe, just maybe, they sounded something like this. Can you imagine?