musician, songwriter, and rhythm and blues star, was born John Marshall Alexander Jr. in Memphis, Tennessee, the son of John Marshall Alexander and Leslie Newsome. His father earned his living in Memphis as a packer, but his lifework was as a commuting minister to two rural Baptist churches in eastern Arkansas. At LaRose Grammar School in South Memphis, John Jr. as his family called him displayed both musical and artistic talent He mastered the piano at home but was allowed to play only religious music Along with his mother and siblings he sang in the choir at Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church Becoming restless at Booker T Washington High School John Jr dropped out in the eleventh grade to join the navy and see the world His sisters recalled military police coming to the house in search of their brother and thought of his brief period ...
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Ace, Johnny
James M. Salem
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Baker, LaVern
Barry Marshall
singer, was born in Chicago as Delores Williams. Nothing is known about her parents. Raised by her aunt, Merline Baker, also known as the blues singer Memphis Minnie, Baker started singing almost as soon as she could walk, both in her Baptist church and in the street. She grew up in poverty and sang for change on the downtown Chicago streets from the age of three. She started singing professionally as a teenager at the Club Delisa, decked out in down-home clothes and billed as “Little Miss Sharecropper.” The “Sharecropper” sobriquet was a takeoff on the popular blues shouter “Little Miss Cornshucks,” and although it garnered her attention at the time, she was embarrassed by it later in her life. She also appeared at different venues as Bea Baker.
At the age of seventeen, Baker moved to Detroit. By 1947 she was appearing regularly at ...
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Bernhardt, Clyde
Barry Kernfeld
jazz trombonist and singer, was born Clyde Edric Barnhardt in Gold Hill, North Carolina, the son of Washington Michael Barnhardt, a miner, and Elizabeth Mauney. When Clyde was a child, he added Barron to his name because his grandmother in slavery had been lent to a family named Barron who treated her kindly. He changed the spelling of his surname in 1930 on the advice of a psychic. Thus his full name became Clyde Edric Barron Bernhardt or Clyde E. B. Bernhardt.
In 1912, after his father suffered a heart attack and left mining, Bernhardt helped to peddle goods from a wagon. The family moved to New Hope (later absorbed into Badin), North Carolina, and in 1915 his father died. Bernhardt attended school for three months each year while holding various jobs, including work at Alcoa Aluminum in 1918 The following year his mother ...
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Bostic, Earl
Barry Kernfeld
alto saxophonist, was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Details about his parents are unknown. Bostic played clarinet in school and saxophone with the local Boy Scouts. By 1930 or 1931 when he left Tulsa to tour with Terrence Holder's Twelve Clouds of Joy, Bostic was already a saxophone virtuoso. Fellow saxophonist Buddy Tate recalls that Bostic was asked to join the band because of his dexterity and maturity as a soloist. Holder's band members then informally tested Bostic's ability to read difficult music: skipping the opportunity to rehearse, Bostic counted off an impossibly fast tempo and played the piece on first sight with such skill that only he and the drummer made it through to the end. “We let him alone after that,” Tate said.
Sometime in the early 1930s Bostic spent a year at Creighton University in Omaha Nebraska playing by day in an ROTC band and by night with ...
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Bradshaw, Tiny
Michael J. Budds
singer, drummer, and bandleader, was born Myron Carlton Bradshaw in Youngstown, Ohio. His parents' names are unknown. He played the drums from the age of ten and soon after was performing professionally as a drummer and vocalist. Early in his career he served as the drummer of the Jump Johnson Band in Buffalo, New York. He attended Wilberforce University in Wilberforce, Ohio, and majored in psychology. Before forming his own big band in 1934, he sang with Horace Henderson's Collegians, and in New York he either drummed or sang with Marion Hardy's Alabamians, the Savoy Bearcats, Mills Blue Rhythm Band (1932–1933), and Luis Russell (1933–1934).
Bradshaw s own band enjoyed long engagements in the ballrooms and nightclubs of Harlem notably the Savoy and the Apollo Philadelphia and Chicago and toured throughout the United States and Europe making its reputation with powerful blues based jazz His ...
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Bristol, Johnny
Linda M. Carter
singer, songwriter, producer, and arranger, was born John William Bristol in Morganton, North Carolina, the son of James and Mary Bristol. While in high school, Bristol was named to the All-State Football Team, and he formed a singing group known as the Jackets. After graduating from high school he enlisted in the United States Air Force and was stationed at Fort Custer, in Battle Creek, Michigan. Bristol and Robert “Jackey” Beavers formed part of the group the High Fives, though soon left to form the duo Johnny and Jackey. In 1959 Gwen Gordy and Billy Davis signed the two young men to their Anna Records label, and Johnny and Jackey recorded two 45s before Gordy and Harvey Fuqua established Tri-Phi Records in 1961 Johnny and Jackey recorded four 45s The duo s songs garnered a modicum of success in the Midwest but failed to ...
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Brown, Chuck
SaFiya D. Hoskins
music pioneer, musician, and singer, was born Charles L. Brown in Charlotte, North Carolina; his parents were migrant farmers about whom little information is available. In 1942Chuck moved with his parents to Fairmont Heights in Prince George's County, Maryland, a small suburban neighborhood just outside of Northeast Washington, D.C. As a boy Chuck worked odd jobs to assist his parents financially. He sold newspapers, cut logs, shined shoes, laid bricks, and could be heard singing “watermelon, watermelon” for the horse-drawn watermelon cart. Chuck's love for music began as a boy in North Carolina, replaying the piano and rhythms he heard in church of the bass drum, cymbals, and the snare over and again in his head. In Fairmont Heights at Mount Zion Holiness Church he played piano while his mother accompanied him on harmonica. Chuck studied piano with Sister Louise Murray who exposed him to ...
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Butler, Jerry
Charles L. Hughes
singer, songwriter, and politician, was one of four children born to J. T. and Alveria Butler, in Sunflower, Mississippi. The Butlers, a Mississippi sharecropping family, moved to Chicago in 1942, where they lived in the Cabrini-Green Housing Projects. J. T. Butler worked a variety of jobs to support his family until his death in 1953, and, following his passing, relatives and friends moved in to help the family make ends meet. Jerry, active in the Church of God in Christ (COGIC), soon became known around his community for his musical ability and rich baritone voice, and he quickly began performing as a gospel artist with friends and fellow COGIC members. One of Jerry's friends, a prodigious musician and songwriter named Curtis Mayfield would soon join Butler in a singing group called the Roosters The group subsequently changed its name to the Impressions Signing to Vee Jay Records ...
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Crudup, Arthur
Bill McCulloch and Barry Lee Pearson
blues singer and songwriter, was born in Forest, Mississippi, between Jackson and Meridian, the son of Minnie Louise Crudup, an unmarried domestic worker. His father was reputed to be a musician, but Crudup recalled seeing him only twice. Raised by his mother in poverty, Crudup began singing both blues and religious music around age ten. In 1916 he and his mother moved to Indianapolis. After she became ill, Crudup dropped out of school and took a job in a foundry at age thirteen.
According to his own account Crudup did not start playing guitar until around 1937, by which time he had returned to the South, married and divorced his first wife, Annie Bell Reed and taken work as a farmhand Supposedly he found a guitar with only two strings and one by one added the other four while picking up rudimentary chords from a local musician ...
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Dozier, Lamont Herbert
Steve Feffer
songwriter, music producer and performer, was born in Detroit, Michigan. Information about his parents is largely unknown. As a young child he rehearsed with a local Baptist church's gospel choir and listened to his aunt play classical music on the family piano. His interest in music developed in the late 1940s and early 1950s as he heard popular singers such as Nat “King” Cole, Frank Sinatra, and Tony Bennett through his father's record collection. Later he started his own collection of singles by singers such as Johnny Mathis and vocal and doo-wop groups that included Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers and the Spaniels. Though he was a self-taught musician, he was writing his own lyrics by the age of eleven and music by the age of twelve, and at the age of thirteen he formed the musical group the Romeos.
In 1957 the Romeos released the ...
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Dupree, William Thomas
Charles Rosenberg
musician, primarily playing rhythm and blues on the piano, known professionally as “Champion Jack” Dupree, was born in New Orleans, Louisiana. His parents were killed when he was an infant, in a fire that burned their grocery store, and their names have never been established.
Dupree sometimes said that the fire had been set by the Ku Klux Klan. “All my life, from six years old” he later recalled, “I wanted to work and save up enough money and git enough ammunition and catch them in a meeting and spray them and let em spray me long as I could lay down dead in the field with a few of them I d be happy Norman p 130 Other times he said it was a spontaneous explosion Davis pp 52 53 a fire from an exploding kerosene container used for fueling lamps and the roof fell in Their names ...
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Edwards, Tommy
Elvatrice Parker Belsches
singer, songwriter, and pianist, was born Thomas Jefferson Edwards Jr. in Henrico County, Virginia, one of six children of Thomas J. Edwards Sr., an educational administrator, and Buena Vista Edwards. His death certificate and family histories indicate that biographies giving him a birth date of February 1922 are incorrect. Also a Henrico County native, Edwards's father was a Hampton Institute graduate who taught wheelwrighting at Tuskegee Institute before being appointed supervisor of the black schools of Macon County, Alabama, by Dr. Booker T. Washington. The senior Edwards returned to Virginia in 1914 to become president of the Negro Reformatory Association and superintendent of the Virginia Manual Labor Training School for Colored Boys. In a home replete with two pianos, Tommy's parents instilled a love of music in their children and Tommy s special talents became readily apparent at a young age By high ...
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Ervin, Booker
Barry Kernfeld
jazz tenor saxophonist, was born Booker Telleferro Ervin Jr. in Denison, Texas, the son of Booker Ervin, a trombonist who played with the tenor saxophonist Buddy Tate; his mother's name is unknown. Booker played his father's instrument from ages eight to thirteen and then abandoned music. In 1950 he borrowed a tenor saxophone to play in an Army Air Force band, but was discharged in 1952 or 1953 and spent another period away from playing before studying in Boston at the Berklee School of Music in 1953–1954. He returned to Texas and again dropped out of music. From 1955 to 1956 he played with rhythm and blues bands in the Southwest and in Chicago, including a period with Ernie Fields's group. In 1956 he traveled to Dallas and then to Denver where he played his first jazz jobs but once again became dissatisfied with his playing ...
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Forrest, Jimmy
Barry Kernfeld
jazz and rhythm and blues tenor saxophonist, was born James Robert Forrest Jr. in St. Louis, Missouri, the son of James Forrest and Eva Dowd, a pianist and church organist. His father's occupation is unknown, but he also played music. Forrest started on alto saxophone and switched to tenor about two years later. His first jobs were local, with his mother's trio and, at age fifteen, with Eddie Johnson and the St. Louis Crackerjacks. While still in high school he played with Fate Marable's band during summer vacations, from 1935 to 1937. He was a member of the Jeter-Pillars big band, which included the bassist Jimmy Blanton.
Leaving home, Forrest joined Don Albert's band early in 1938 for jobs in Houston Fort Worth and Dallas Texas and a long tour of the South and the eastern seaboard He left Albert by year s end ...
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Fulson, Lowell
Andrew James Kellett
blues guitarist, vocalist, and recording artist, was born of African American and Choctaw parents on a reservation in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Lowell was the first of four children. Little is known of Fulson's early years in Tulsa except that he was heavily exposed to the musical styles that later served as the two major formative influences on his long career: Western swing, exemplified by the recordings of Bob Wills, and classic gospel music. Fulson's was a highly musical family: his grandfather played violin, and his two uncles played guitar. It was from these two uncles that Lowell and his younger brother Martin learned to play. Lowell Fulson began his career in 1939–1940 under the veteran country bluesman Alger “Texas” Alexander—Fulson replaced an as-yet-unknown guitarist named Chester Burnett—touring Oklahoma and Texas with Alexander's band.
Fulson was drafted by the United States Navy in 1943 and ...
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Gale, Eric
Scott Yanow
studio, R&B, and jazz guitarist, was born in Brooklyn, New York. His parents’ names are not recorded. Gale first played bass when he was 12. After brief periods on tenor sax, trombone, and tuba, he decided to switch to guitar. He had originally planned to become a chemist. Gale majored in chemistry at Niagara University in Lewiston, New York, and even worked briefly as a chemist, but he was so much in demand as a guitarist by the time that he graduated that music was an easy choice for him.
Gale would never be out of work He developed a very accessible soulful and bluish style that fit naturally into R B and soul groups He had very impressive technical skills which made him a natural studio musician And he could improvise well whenever he was in jazz settings Most impressive is that he was completely self taught ...
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Grimes, Tiny
Barry Kernfeld
jazz and rhythm and blues guitarist and bandleader, was born Lloyd Grimes in Newport News, Virginia. The names of his parents are unknown. Grimes told the interviewer Bob Kenselaar that he was unsure of his birth date but told the writers Stanley Dance and Arnie Berle that he was born in 1917. Other published sources give 1916 or 1915. He took up drums in a Boy Scout marching band and played regularly at a beach dancehall near Newport News until a storm and subsequent flood destroyed the hall and his drums. Around the seventh grade he dropped out of school to work jobs selling papers and shining shoes. He taught himself to play piano, and while living in Washington, D.C., he became a pianist and singer in a trio called Wynken, Blynken, and Nod. The group performed regularly on radio on Major Bowes's Original Amateur Hour ...
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Hampton, Lionel Leo
Sholomo B. Levy
vibraphone pioneer, philanthropist, and big band leader, was born in Louisville, Kentucky, to Charles Edward, a railroad worker, and Gertrude Morgan, a waitress. Lionel's father was sent to France as a combat soldier during World War I and was soon declared missing in action. When his family could not learn of his whereabouts, they presumed that he had been killed. Mrs. Hampton had returned to her parents in Birmingham, Alabama, where Lionel was entrusted to his grandparents, Richard and Louvenia Morgan Lionel considered them to be his parents after his mother remarried and started a new family After achieving fame Lionel had a brief reunion with the father he thought he had lost three decades earlier when a fan told him of an elderly man who had been blinded in the war and living in a Veterans Administration hospital in Ohio who told everyone ...
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Harris, Wynonie
Gayle Murchison
rhythm and blues singer known as “Mr. Blues,” was born in Omaha, Nebraska, to the fifteen-year-old Mallie Hood Anderson. (His birth year is often incorrectly given as 1915.) Harris saw his father, a Native American named Blue Jay, only once in his life. Luther Harris married Mallie and became Wynonie's stepfather. Wynonie Harris attended Omaha public schools, leaving Central High before graduation. By the time Harris was nineteen, he had fathered two children. His first child, a daughter named Mickey, was born to Naomi Henderson on 19 October 1932. His second was a son, Wesley, born to Laura Devereaux on 13 August 1933. Harris's third child was a daughter, Adrianne Patricia (Pattie), born 20 May 1936 to the teenage Olive (“Ollie”) E. Goodlow. The couple married on 11 December 1936; they had no more children.
Harris began his career as a ...
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Humes, Helen
Barry Kernfeld
jazz, blues, and rhythm and blues singer, was born in Louisville, Kentucky, the daughter of John Henry Humes, a railroad worker who became one of the first African American attorneys in Louisville and then worked in real estate, and Emma Johnson, a schoolteacher. “Well, I was born June 23, 1909, but I put it June 23, 1913. And everybody that's been writing books and things, they got 1913,” Humes explained to Helen Oakley Dance (12 May 1981). Her mother sang in a Baptist church choir and played piano at home. Humes sang with her mother and then took piano lessons as well. At Central High School her classmates included the jazz trombonist Dicky Wells, the drummer Bill Beason, and the trumpeter Jonah Jones At age seventeen before finishing her schooling Humes traveled to St Louis ...
