Jimmie Lunceford

Happy Birthday Jimmie Lunceford 1902-1947...Although Lunceford played several instruments, including the alto saxophone, he was best known as a Big Band leader. He got his start in 1927 when he taught music  at Manassas High School in Memphis, Tennessee where he organized a student jazz band called the Chicksaw Syncopaters. The band began a professional career under the name Jimmie Lunceford Orchestra in 1929 and made it's first recordings that year and again in 1930. The band went on tour, made a few more recordings (that didn't get released until much later) but their real breakthrough came in 1934 when they headlined the Cotton Club with their revue "Cotton Club Parade" featuring Adelaide Hall.

The Cotton Club had already made the careers of Cab Calloway and Duke Ellington and Lunceford's band was a perfect fit. Known for their tight musicianship and often outrageous lyrics in their music, the band quickly developed a following with the club's all white audience. Trumpeter Sy Oliver wrote the imaginative arrangements for the band and devised the "Lunceford two-beat" rhythm. The band was known more for it's ensemble work rather than blazing solos. For that reason, even though at the time the band was just as popular as Ellington's or Basie's, many jazz critics now put them on a second tier.

Songs like "Four or Five Times", Rhythm is Our Business", "I'm Nuts About Screwy Music", and "T'ain't What You Do" showcased the vaudevillian antics of the band which often included costumes, skits and sly references to popular white jazz dance bands in their act. They toured Europe in 1937 but a second tour was cancelled when WW2 broke out. They appeared in the film "Blues in the Night" in 1941 but the band had begun to lose the better players due to being underpaid.

In 1947, while playing in Seaside, Oregon, Lunceford collapsed and died of cardiac arrest while signing autographs at the age of 45. It was rumored that he was poisoned by a restaurant owner who was upset that he had to serve African-Americans. Some give credence to that idea considering the rest of the band, who also ate at the restaurant, also became ill. Today, the Jimmie Lunceford Jamboree Festival takes place each July in Memphis, Tennessee in his honor.