Jay McShann

Blues musician Jay McShann was born in Muskogee, OK, in 1916. As a young man he taught himself to play the piano. At 20 years of age he moved to Kansas City, MO, and secured gigs playing in the city's jazz clubs and lounges. He normally played with a quartet, but in 1938 he expanded that to a seven-piece band, expanding it again to an 11-piece outfit the next year (one of its members was future sax legend Charlie Parker). The band became wildly popular in Kansas City and in 1941 it signed a recording deal with Decca Records. The band was amassing a large following in Kansas City when World War Ii broke out, and many of its members found themselves drafted into the armed forces, including McShann himself. After the war, McShann put together another band, although a much smaller one this time and oriented more towards R&B than blues (among this band's members was Jimmy Witherspoon). The band recorded regularly, but by the 1950s the emergence of rock-and-roll meant that McShann's blues/swing/R&B sound was on its way out. The band broke up, but McShann himself continued performing. In the 1970s he made several tours of Europe. In 1988 he was inducted into the Blues Foundation Hall of Fame. He died in Kansas City, MO, on December 7, 2006.