Thelma Terry - Bandleader

Bandleader

A stint at a local Chicago theater in the spring of 1927 and an article in Variety brought national attention to Thelma Combes. The newly formed Music Corporation of America took notice. They renamed her Thelma Terry and in April 1927 organized for her an all-male band (including a very young Gene Krupa) called Thelma Terry and Her Playboys. Some sources state that the band's home was The Golden Pumpkin nightclub located at 3800 West Madison in Chicago, and that the Playboys may have been the house band. MCA billed Terry as "The Beautiful Blonde Siren of Syncopation", "The Jazz Princess", and "The Female Paul Whiteman". At least one musician, Bud Freeman, was so enthused by the quality of the band that he paid another musician to fill his seat in the Spike Hamilton Band so he could join the Playboys. The band was soon sent by MCA on a national tour that took them down the Eastern Seaboard and as far west as Kansas City.

Terry found the day-to-day work of acting as a bandleader difficult. Bill Otto, a pianist who recorded with her in Chicago, recalled that she was a beautiful woman (in his words, "even voluptuous"), and that he got along with her because (unlike other band members) he did not make unwelcome advances to her. She also found that the male musicians were unwilling to follow her directions, and that the work itself, and especially the travel, was lonely and difficult to endure.

In 1929, MCA decided that Terry and her band would begin an international tour beginning in Berlin, Germany. However, by that time she had met Willie Haar, the owner of a Savannah, Georgia winter resort at which the band played during their 1929 tour. Terry disbanded the Playboys and quit MCA to marry Haar and settle down in Savannah.