Founded in 1909 by Professor Laurence Clifton Jones as the Piney Woods Country Life School, Piney Woods made musical training a central part of its educational mission and developed influential vocal groups and bands over many decades. Even while the school was still housed in a converted sheep shed, it had a piano, and beginning in 1923 Jones sent Cotton Blossom Singers groups across the nation on fundraising tours. Between 1929 and 1951, the Mississippi School for the Blind for Negroes was also located at Piney Woods, where blind students performed spirituals and popular songs. A quartet led by Archie Brownlee began singing on campus in 1936, was recorded the following year by John A. and Alan Lomax for the Library of Congress, and later, as the Five Blind Boys of Mississippi, helped popularize the hard gospel style of quartet singing; Brownlee's dramatic moans, shrieks, and wails influenced soul singers including Ray Charles, James Brown, and Wilson Pickett. In the mid-1930s, Jones also started jazz bands including the all-male Syncollegians and the all-female Sweethearts of Rhythm, first led by Consuella Carter. Because some members had Chinese, Mexican, and Hawaiian heritage, the Sweethearts became known as the International Sweethearts of Rhythm, toured nationally beginning in 1939, broke from the school in 1941 to go professional, and became the most popular of the female bands that flourished during World War II; their understudies at Piney Woods, the Junior Sweethearts of Rhythm, continued performing as the Swinging Rays of Rhythm. The school's musical programs also nurtured blues artists, including Sam Myers, a Laurel-born bluesman who attended the school for the blind there from age 10, sang in vocal groups, played trumpet and drums, later studied music in Chicago, performed professionally with Elmore James and others, recorded his first single in 1957 for the Jackson-based Ace label, and later gained acclaim with Anson Funderburgh and the Rockets. Other blues artists who attended Piney Woods included guitarist Jody Williams and drummer Billy Stepney.
