Susie's Kitchen Kabinet Band

Susie's Kitchen Kabinet Band

It wasn’t like any band people were used to seeing.

The instruments didn’t come from a music store. They came from the kitchen. Dish pans. Tin spoons. Pie plates. Curtain rods. Flour sifters. Everything was bent, soldered, and turned into something that could make noise.

Every instrument started out as a household object.

One of them had a kazoo soldered right into the mouthpiece. The violin player skipped the soldering altogether and just held a kazoo in her mouth while she played.

It worked better than it had any right to.

The Daily Nonpareil said that “when fifteen or twenty or thirty kazoos are used and the voices of the orchestra harmonized there is a certain stirring quality to the performance and a rhythm and swing that is contagious.”

Each show started with a story told in verse.

Every song followed a theme. There were solos. There were surprises. Just enough unpredictability to keep the audience paying attention.

No one ever seemed completely sure where the band came from.

One paper guessed Kentucky, though it offered no proof. A women’s magazine helped launch their popularity. After that, the band spread mostly by word of mouth, with one organization telling another.

The idea belonged to Mrs. Harvey Smith.

She created the band to entertain housewives and women’s club groups, usually for charity. By 1927, the band had raised more than $4,000 for churches and women’s organizations.

Mrs. Smith rented the band out for ten dollars a night.

It was a bargain. Groups often raised a hundred or even two hundred dollars at a single event.

The band’s origins stayed vague. All anyone seemed to know for certain was that Mrs. Smith was a “domestic soul” and “a clubwoman.”

The exact location was never mentioned.

The story here came from a Council Bluffs paper dated August 27, 1927. One modern source claims the band may have started in St. Louis.

Where it really began was anyone’s guess.