Stacey Marbrey

Project

MOXIE: The International Sweethearts of Rhythm is a feature-length documentary in development that uncovers the story of The International Sweethearts of Rhythm, widely recognized as the nation’s first racially integrated, all-women swing band. Formed at Piney Woods Country Life School in Mississippi, the Sweethearts rose to national prominence during the 1930s and 1940s, touring through the Jim Crow era with a level of visibility and virtuosity that the culture was not built to accommodate. Their success demanded constant negotiation: across racial lines, across gendered expectations of performance and propriety, and across an industry that profited from Black artistry while withholding recognition, protection, and historical credit.

At the center of MOXIE is the band’s groundbreaking solidarity: an ensemble led by Black women that also brought together musicians of multiple racial and ethnic backgrounds including: Latina, Asian, Native American, and white women, as well as women of mixed heritage, working side by side in a touring unit during a violently segregated period. Their collaboration created a radical kind of harmony onstage, even as the world around them enforced division.

Told through archival research and contemporary reflection, MOXIE reclaims a legacy that has too often been flattened, marginalized, or omitted from the canon of American music history. The film draws on rare photographs, documents, and ephemera to reconstruct the Sweethearts’ routes, working conditions, and the creative economies that shaped their lives on the road. In doing so, it invites a larger conversation about women’s cultural labor, how it is remembered, who is allowed to author the record, and what it means to preserve history when the archive is incomplete by design.

More than a story of a band, MOXIE is a story about memory and power: about how art travels, how communities survive, and how music can operate as a public-facing form of cultural diplomacy, even when the nation it represents denies full citizenship to the artists creating it. By bringing the Sweethearts’ story to the foreground, the project expands the historical record and offers audiences a cinematic tribute to women who played louder than the world would allow, and changed what was possible in the process.