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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Born2it, post: 10683379, member: 59977&quot;]Well.&nbsp; I went so far down the rabbit hole looking for your violinist that I probably smell of carrots! There were a plethora of African American men who played the violin during the appropriate time period, but you would certainly never guess that from initial search results online.</p><p><br /></p><p>I might do a separate post with the resources and references I amassed during my deep dive, but for the time being, I was able to verify my recollection that one of the reasons there were so many big swing and jazz bands was the surfeit of classically trained black musicians who couldn’t get work playing classical music.</p><p><br /></p><p>Anyway, one avenue possibly worth pursuing is jazz violin scholar Anthony Barnett. An email address for him is <a href="mailto:ab@abar.net">ab@abar.net</a> and perhaps he might recognize your violinist if you sent him a a digital image.&nbsp; Don’t put it off, though, as he is over 80.</p><p><br /></p><p>I must, however, share these pictures I found of a young “Papa” John Creach, who many of us probably remember from Jefferson Airplane, Hot Tuna, and guest appearances with the Grateful Dead and Charlie Daniels.&nbsp; However, he was initially classically trained, then played with with <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Armstrong" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Armstrong" rel="nofollow">Louis Armstrong</a>, <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fats_Waller" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fats_Waller" rel="nofollow">Fats Waller</a>, <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuff_Smith" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuff_Smith" rel="nofollow">Stuff Smith</a>, <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Christian" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Christian" rel="nofollow">Charlie Christian</a>, <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Joe_Turner" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Joe_Turner" rel="nofollow">Big Joe Turner</a>, <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-Bone_Walker" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-Bone_Walker" rel="nofollow">T-Bone Walker</a>, <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nat_King_Cole" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nat_King_Cole" rel="nofollow">Nat King Cole</a> and <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Milton" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Milton" rel="nofollow">Roy Milton</a>. You can actually catch a glimpse of him backing Nat King Cole about 19 minutes into the 1953 movie “The Blue Gardenia” - but I digress.</p><p><br /></p><p>In these two different versions of the same picture from two different newspaper ads in the early 1940’s, he would have been in his mid twenties. These are the earliest pictures I could find, by 20+ years.</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]533667[/ATTACH] [ATTACH=full]533668[/ATTACH][/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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