Leona May Smith
Leona May Smith was an American musician, a trumpeter and cornettist, based in New York City for most of her career.
Early life
Leona May Smith was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, the daughter of Willard R. Smith and Carrie M. Brown Smith. Her father was an amateur musician. She started playing the cornet on radio from childhood.Career
In 1929, still a teenager, Smith played first trumpet in the Boston Women's Symphony, with Ethel Leginska conducting. In 1942, she won the Ossip Gabrilowitsch Scholarship Fund Award from the National Orchestra Association.She was a soloist in the Radio [City Music Hall|Radio City Music Hall Orchestra] from 1943 to 1945, and was the first woman trumpeter in the Metropolitan Opera stage band, where she was engaged from 1960 to 1961. She also played with Fred Waring. She was featured as a soloist in the forty-member Seuffert Band, a longtime institution in Queens. She also led her own ensemble, the Leona May Smith Dance Band, and composed works, including "Mignon Fantasy". "She has been hailed by critics as being not only the greatest woman cornettist," reported one newspaper in 1940, "but has been unquestionably conceded to be one of the greatest soloists of this generation."
Smith and her husband founded and co-directed a summer music program, Ethan Allen Music Camp, in Craftsbury, Vermont, from 1949 to 1957. In 1961 she gave a presentation to a conference of school music teachers in Brooklyn. After 1973, she lived in Plymouth, Massachusetts, where she ran a home for elderly women. In 1993, Smith and two trombonists were honored as Brasswomen Pioneers at the first International Women's Brass Conference, held in St. Louis.