Who were the Goree Girls?

My friend Nadine has just sent me a link to an amazing article in Texas Magazine about the Goree Girls called O Sister, Where Art Thou?

The story of the Goree All Girl String Band is being made into a movie with Jennifer Aniston, and rumor has it, Gerard Butler.

In the early forties, eight inmates of the Goree prison unit formed one of the first all-female country and western acts in the country, capturing the hearts of millions of radio listeners.

They called themselves the Goree All Girl String Band, and every Wednesday evening in the early forties, an estimated seven million Americans tuned their radios to WBAP in Fort Worth—then a 50,000-watt clear-channel station that was able to broadcast its signal across the country—just so they could listen to a musical variety show that featured the group.

This sounds like it could be a sort of A League of Their Own, but in prison and with music. The story is one of those that if you wrote it as a screenplay, you'd say it was unbelievable, but it's all true! From what the article says about the woman inmate who started the band, Reable Childs, I could see Jennifer Aniston playing her. And there is an amazing love story with an inmate from the male prison, on death row for murder, that she married in real life after they both got out of prison! Cue smoldering Gerard...