March is Women’s History Month. Despite obstacles and discrimination, many brilliant women have guided the course of popular music and inspired cultural movements both around the world and here in Minnesota. The Current is highlighting stories of women who made revolutionary contributions to our local music scene. Our Women’s History Month stream is The Siren.

From 1920 to 1933, Prohibition outlawed the manufacture, sale, and transportation of alcohol — but Minnesotans found other ways to enjoy their spirits. St. Paul’s bootlegging business was booming, and the city’s bands provided the soundtrack.

At that time, jazz in the Twin Cities was mainly performed by white musicians emulating the Black jazz artists. One notable exception: Black jazz pianist and vocalist Nettie Hayes Sherman, entertained speakeasy audiences with her own blend of ragtime, Dixieland jazz, and popular tunes.

Sherman was born in Kentucky in 1900, and was raised by a white family that her mother worked for. After parochial school, she studied at the Boston Conservatory of Music. Sherman moved to Minnesota in 1917 and was hired as on-air talent at the radio station that later became WCCO.

In the early 1920s, Nettie Hayes Sherman entertained at Than’s — a St. Paul speakeasy that served politicians, railroad pioneer James J. Hill, and gangsters. St. Paul also attracted organized crime figures from Chicago such as Tommy O’Connell, John Dillinger, and Baby Face Nelson, who at one point even proposed to her.

By the early 1930s, Sherman was running a club at 350 Cedar Street in downtown St. Paul. Later that decade, she headed to Chicago and then New York, linking up for performances with Fats Waller, Pearl Bailey, Louis Armstrong, and Duke Ellington.

Over her career, Nettie Hayes Sherman sang thousands of songs in languages ranging from Spanish to Arabic, Yiddish to Gaelic — often employing a conversational style.

Sherman returned to Minnesota in 1974. By then, she'd been married and widowed four times, and was raising three kids, all from troubled families, she had adopted in her 60s. All the while, she worked as a nurses' aide and housekeeper to make extra money, but continued performing live, including as part of the world premiere run of the play Nina! Madam to a Saintly City at the History Theatre in 1980. In 1986, Nettie Hayes Sherman died of a stroke at age 85 in Rochester.

Learn even more about Nettie Hayes Sherman in A Brief History of Women in Bars: A Minnesota Story in Three Rounds, as well as in Joined at the Hip: A History of Jazz in the Twin Cities by Jay Goetting, published by Minnesota Historical Society Press.  Women’s History Month on The Current is a collaboration with the Minnesota Historical Society.