Billie Rogers

Her father, William Cody Smith (1885–1970), played violin, alto sax, and banjo.

Her mother, Bertha Emde (née Fleming; 1892–1976) played ragtime piano and accordion.

Her older brother, Lester Smith (1913–1936), was proficient on sax.

Billie Rogers (née Zelda Louise Smith) (May 31, 1917 – January 18, 2014) was an American jazz trumpeter and singer who was a member of Woody Herman's band from 1941 to 1943.

Rogers was born Zelda Louise Smith on May 31, 1917, in North Plains, Oregon.

Her family moved to Rainier, Washington, before she was 2 and remained there until age 13.

She attended elementary school and first year of high school at Rainier, a small rural community 17 miles inland from Olympia.

Her younger brother, Kenneth Gaylord Smith (1920–2005), played sax.

She also had a younger sister, Alice V. (Mrs. Olaf Hemnes; 1924–1996).

During the years in Rainier, the family formed a band called "Smith's Rainier Entertainers," composed of Billie's father, mother, her brother Les, herself, and a hired drummer.

Billie played trumpet and sang through a megaphone.

She began studying piano at age 6.

She also began playing trumpet when she was around 8, when her older brother, Les, decided he didn't care for that particular instrument.

Les had learned to play several instruments by the time he graduated from the University of Montana in 1936, mainly piano, saxophone, clarinet and flute.

Les was also a prolific arranger.

He played baritone horn in the university marching band and was student director of the Missoula High School band.

Over the years, her mother expanded her skills to playing organ, accordion, and double-bass; she learned soprano sax, but later had to make a decision as to which instrument to focus on.

Trumpet prevailed.

Both she and her brother, Les, were born with perfect pitch, a fact that neither had realized until she was 8 and he was 12.

They had both assumed that everyone heard music the way they did.

Their parents were astounded and didn't even know what to call it.

Les began attending Washington State College at the age of 16, with a full scholarship.

The depression hit and her parents had to bring him home.

Les taught piano in Tacoma until he made connections with a local band in Missoula, Montana, and enrolled for his last two years of education at the University of Montana.

Les died 3 months after graduation, in 1936, from a ruptured appendix, shortly before the discovery of sulfa and long before antibiotics.

He had sent for his sister when she was 17.

They shared an apartment and she played and sung in his band for the intervening years.

Woody Herman discovered Rogers in August 1941.

After his band had finished for the evening at the Palladium Ballroom Cafe in Hollywood, Herman had gone to a small Los Angeles night club on the advice of his road manager where Rogers was singing and playing trumpet.

Impressed, he asked for an introduction.

Sammy Cahn, the songwriter, introduced them, and within a few minutes Herman hired her for his Blues on Parade band.

She made her debut at the Panther Room of the Sherman Hotel in Chicago.

She stayed in Missoula until 1941, married Guy C. Rogers (1918–1996) and worked with local musicians.

At that time the couple, who had not children, decided to divorce and she ended up in California at the request of some musician friends.

When she transferred her union membership from Missoula to Los Angeles, Rogers was informed that she couldn't work a steady job for the first six months.

She led her own band in 1943.

At the end of that year, she joined Jerry Wald's band and remained a member until October 1945, when she left to form her own sextet.

Rogers is credited as the first woman to hold a horn position in a major jazz orchestra.

She skipped two grades and graduated from high school at Renton, Washington, on the day after her 16th birthday.

She was raised in a family of musicians.