Jane Jarvis born 31 October 1915

Jane Nossette Jarvis (October 31, 1915 – January 25, 2010) was an American jazz pianist. She was also known for her work as a composer, a baseball stadium organist and a recording industry executive.

Jarvis was born in Vincennes, Indiana, to Charles and Luella Nossette. She was recognized as a piano prodigy at the age of five and she studied under a Vincennes University professor as a young girl. Her family moved to Gary, Indiana soon afterward, and Jarvis was hired to play the piano at radio station WJKS in Gary in 1927.

The station gave her a job as accompanist to performers who came in to promote their local appearances. Singers, including the famed black singer Ethel Waters, were startled to find their accompanist was a 12-year- old white girl, who was, according to Miss Jarvis, ''a very runty kid.''

 At the age of 13, she was orphaned when her parents died in a train-auto wreck and she returned to Vincennes, graduating from high school in 1932. By then, she had already studied music at the Chicago Conservatory of Music, the Bush Conservatory of Music, Loyola University Chicago and DePauw University.

By 1954, Jarvis was on television at station WTMJ-TV in Milwaukee, hosting a show called "Jivin' with Jarvis" while serving as staff pianist and organist. At the time, the Milwaukee Braves had just relocated from Boston and sought out Jarvis to be the organist at Milwaukee County Stadium.

“I wasn’t a sports fan, and I was uncertain about doing it,” she told The New York Times in 1984. “But money overcame my worries.” Jarvis stayed with the Braves for eight seasons and then went to New York City, where she took a position with the Muzak Corporation as a staff composer and arranger. She would rise to become a corporate vice-president and its director of recording and programming.

In 1964, she was hired by the New York Mets to play the organ at Shea Stadium. She is remembered at Shea for playing the Mets theme song, "Meet The Mets", music and lyrics by Ruth Roberts & Bill Katz (1961) and debuting in the 1963 season before every home game followed by the Jarvis composed "Let's Go Mets", as the team took the field, as well as, for her renditions of the Mexican Hat Dance during the seventh-inning stretch.

             

             Here's "Where or When" from above album.

Jarvis left Muzak in 1978, and the next year she left the Mets to concentrate on her first musical love, jazz piano. She became a fixture at New York nightclubs, frequently playing alongside bassist Milt Hinton. She became a founding member of the Statesmen of Jazz, a group of jazz musicians age 65 and older, sponsored by the American Federation of Jazz Societies. She was the only woman in the group.

One goal of the Statesmen is to present the wonders of jazz music to young audiences across the United States. The Statesmen have also travelled abroad, performing in Japan, among other places.

Jarvis released several albums of her jazz piano work, including Jane Jarvis Jams (1995) and Atlantic/Pacific (2000). In addition to Hinton, Jarvis has often collaborated with trombonist Benny Powell and bassist Earl May. As a member of ASCAP, she also had over three hundred compositions to her credit.

Jane, aged 92 with Benny Powell

Married and divorced three times, Jarvis lived in Cocoa Beach, Florida, where she was honoured in 2003 by the Space Coast Jazz Society for her lifetime achievement. On March 15, 2008, Jarvis was displaced from her New York City residence when a construction crane collapsed, damaging her building on East 50th Street.

Jarvis spent the final years of her life and died at the Lillian Booth Actors Home in Englewood, New Jersey. She was 94. She was survived by a son, Brian, a daughter, Jeanne, and several grandchildren and great-grandchildren. (Info mainly edited from Wikipedia) 

Jane and Jim play around at the piano at the Manassas Jazz Festival, 30 November, 1986.

Bonnie Lou born 27 October 1924

Mary Joan Okum (née Kath; October 27, 1924 – December 8, 2015), known by her performing name Bonnie Lou, was an American musical pioneer, recognized as one of the first female rock and roll singers.  

She is also one of the first artists to gain crossover success from country music to rock and roll. She was the "top name" on the first country music program regularly broadcast on a national TV network. Bonnie Lou was one of the first female co-hosts of a successful syndicated television talk show, and a regular musical performer on popular shows in the 1960s and 1970s. She "was a prime mover in the first days of rockabilly," and is a member of the Rockabilly Hall of Fame. 

Bonnie Lou's real name was Mary Jo Kath, and she was born in 1924 in Illinois. Mary grew up listening to Patsy Montana and her band "The Prairie Ramblers", and was greatly inspired by her. Mary learned how to yodel, which was from the help of her Swiss grandmother. As a child she learned how to play two instruments, the violin and guitar. By the young age of 16, she was singing and performing on a local radio show in Bloomington, Illinois. By age 18, Mary went on a bigger radio show, which aired in Kansas City, Missouri.  

Her exposure on this radio show in Kansas City, helped her land a job as a singer on WLW Radio in Cincinnati, Ohio, where station executive Bill McCluskey hired Mary as a singer a yodeller for his radio show called Midwestern Hayride Country & Western Radio Program. McCluskey was the one who gave Mary Jo the stage name she would be known by for the rest of her life, "Bonnie Lou". While on the radio show in Cincinnati, Lou performed regularly with Country Music girl group the Girls of the Golden West, which Lou listened to as a child. 

Bonnie Lou continued radio performances until the end of the 1940s. Her radio performances were even cut to acetate and released to the public. However, Bonnie Lou never truly broke as a recording artist until the 1950s. 

 

 

                              

In 1953, Lou signed on with her first record company called King Records in Cincinnati, Ohio. In the beginning stages of her recording career, Lou recorded Country Music material and released it. Bonnie soon had big Country Music hits with "Tennessee Wig Walk" and "Seven Lonely Days". Both songs were Top 10 Country hits. The flip side of her hit "Seven Lonely Days" featured the song "Just Out of Reach", which would later be covered by other Country singers, like Patsy Cline, Billie Jo Spears, Jean Shepard, and k.d. Lang.  

Soon, Bonnie started recording Rockabilly or Rock & Roll. In 1954, she recorded the song "Two Side Step", which was written by Murray Wilson, who is the father of The Beach Boys, Carl, Brian, and Dennis. In 1955, she released her first Rock & Roll record called "Daddy-O". The song was a Top 15 Pop hit that year, and turned Lou into a major Rock & Roll star overnight. The song was later covered by The Fontaine Sisters on the Dot Records label.

It wasn't until 1958 though that Bonnie had another hit, this a duet with Rusty York called "La Dee Dah". They soon recorded a Teen Pop song together called "I Let the School Bell Ding-a-Ling". Soon, Lou left the King label for another Cincinnati record label called Fraternity. She released several different singles for Fraternity, one of which were as successful as her singles for the King label. 

Bonnie spent more and more of her later career on television, co-hosting the Paul Dixon Show in Cincinnati. But in keeping faithful to her Country Music roots, she also became a regular on WLWT's Midwestern Hayride, (a show inspired by the legendary Shreveport-based Louisiana Hayride) until it went off the air in the early 70s. After Dixon's death in late 1974, Lou quietly went into retirement and settled in Cincinnati, with her husband Milt, who she has claimed as one of her biggest supporters. She then moved out of the city with husband Milt, making commercials for his furniture shop and hosting a radio show.  

 

In 2008 Cincinnati honoured her with the key to the city. 

 

Bonnie Lou died in her sleep on the morning of December 8, 2015 at Hillebrand Nursing And Rehabilitation Centre in Cincinnati, Ohio, aged 91. She had dementia and was in hospice care.
 

(info edited mainly from Wikipedia)
 

 

 

Bonnie Lou was a long-time  favourite singer on WLW radio and TV out of Cincinnati, Ohio, where she gained a big following on shows like Midwestern Hayride, Ruth Lyons' 50-50 Club, Bob Braun Show and Paul Dixon Show. Her recordings for King Records made her an international star with hits like Seven Lonely Days and Tennessee Wig Walk, which earned her an induction into the Rock-a-Billy Hall of Fame. Here Bonnie is seen live at The Ohio State Fair before an audience of thousands, where she sings a medley of Proud Mary & Behind Closed Doors.

 

Tony Pastor born 26 October 1907

Tony Pastor (born Anthony Pestritto) (October 26, 1907-October 31, 1969) was an Italian American novelty singer and tenor saxophonist and band leader.

Tenor saxophonist and vocalist Tony Pastor began playing professionally while still a teenager. He worked with the Wesleyan Serenaders in the mid-1920s, John Cavallaro in 1927, Irving Aaronson from 1928 to 1930, and Austin Wylie around 1930. He formed his own orchestra based out of Hartford, Connecticut, in 1931. The group struggled, and in 1934 he disbanded it. He toured with Smith Ballew in 1935 and played briefly with Joe Venuti and Vincent Lopez before joining Artie Shaw in 1936, where he remained when Shaw regrouped the following year.

Featured by Shaw as both a musician and singer, Pastor became popular for his expressive singing and impish personality. When Shaw decided to quit the band business in late 1939 and run off to Mexico Pastor was asked to head the orchestra, which was to become a cooperative affair. He turned down the offer and formed his own band instead. His second group proved a success. Pastor was both honest and friendly and well loved by his musicians and fans. His sax playing and his vocals were the highlights of each performance.

Soon after going out on his own, Pastor and his orchestra played at the Hotel Lincoln in New York City for seven months. That engagement included five broadcasts per week on NBC. Pastor won the 1940 Metronome magazine poll as top tenor saxophonist.

                               

Pastor went all out when it came to buying charts for his book. His orchestra featured some of the most modern jazz arrangements of its time. It outlived just about all other swing bands, finally breaking up in the late 1950s.  It was estimated that between 1940 and 1950 Pastor's band travelled a million miles around the U.S. The group's most prominent vocalists, aside from Pastor himself, were sisters Rosemary and Betty Clooney. Other singers included Johnny McAfee, Dorsey Anderson, Kay Little, Eugenie Baird, Virginia Maxey, and Dolores Martel.

Pastor and his orchestra appeared on television a number of times during the 1950s, including the "Cavalcade of Bands" program and the Robert Q. Lewis show.  In 1960, Pastor was guest of honour on a "This Is Your Life" TV episode.   But eventually he reduced the size of his band, cutting it down to a small combo in order to work nightclubs around Las Vegas with his sons Guy and Tony Jr.

Pastor's final recordings were for Roulette (1958), Everest (1959), and Capitol (1960). He appeared with a small group, billed as "Tony Pastor and His All-Stars," on the "Bring Back the Bands" transcribed radio show in 1967.

Early in 1968, Pastor suffered a heart attack and became very ill and quit the music business. He lived in virtual seclusion for the rest of his life. (Info mainly Solid @ Parabrisas.com)

Sascha Burland born 25 October 1927

Sascha was born Granville Alexander Burland on October 25, 1927 in New York City, New York, USA

This artist's name shows up in credits as both Granville Burland and Sascha Burland, and as for the music he wrote, it was heard just about anywhere and everywhere in the '50s and '60s. His main interest was jazz, but he did not choose to work only within that genre. He was more of a missionary, almost to the point of being subversive, landing advertising-jingle contracts for which he could bring in swinging players and arrangers such as Quincy Jones, Art Farmer, or the talented jazz singer Osie Johnson, who chimed in for products such as Nestle and Flit.

While participation in such ventures goes largely unacknowledged by the general public, there were also plenty of opportunities for this composer's name to flash across a television screen when it was time for the credits to roll. He wrote the theme for the extremely popular game show What's My Line?, for example.

Other Burland titles emerge on Latin and pure jazz releases as well, his co-writing partners tending to be impressive. "West Coast Blues" is credited to Burland and guitarist Wes Montgomery, neither of whom could apparently come up with a better title. Maybe Burland was saving his creative chops for his partnership with Don Elliot, with whom he created a pair of novelty records originally attributed to the Nutty Squirrels, Two chipmunk characters that sang jazzy scat numbers.

 

 

  "Uh-Oh (Part 1)" peaked at #45 on the Billboard Pop Singles Chart, while "Uh-Oh (Part 2)" peaked at #14 in 1959. They also made it to television before Alvin, Theodore and Simon, but The Nutty Squirrels Present, which aired in 1960-61, was not a success. As happens with most novelties, the Nutty Squirrels soon became dated. Burland went back to his mostly behind-the-scenes work; he was the credited composer on the T-Bones’ 1966 Top 10 single “No Matter What Shape (Your Stomach’s In),” which originated as an Alka-Seltzer jingle. It was covered by more than a dozen artists including the Ventures.

In between, Burland, with help from The Skipjack Choir and Mason Adams, recorded one of the great lost Christmas novelty records. “The chickens are in the chimes!”

Such outbursts of silly behaviour seem at odds with certain facts about Burland. He was an ex-Marine whose favourite musicians were technically flashy but by-the-book guitarists, such as Barney Kessel and George Van Eps. Burland entered music as a piano student, eventually studying with Barry Galbraith and finding steady work in both radio and television involving his developing talents in the overlapping areas of production, composing, playing and even singing.

His success is a clear demonstration of the importance of bucking prevailing opinion in the commercial music business at any given time. Burland, of course, was told early and often that there was no place for sophisticated musical ideas in the world of advertising. He proved his doubters wrong, and has come to be considered one of the great pioneers in expanding the audience for jazz, representing progress from the days when his name was more likely to come up in conjunction with indigestion.

Sacha is now in semi retirement as an artist and illustrator and is located in new Orleans LA. (Info mainly All Music)

Willie Mabon born 24 October 1925

Willie James Mabon (October 24, 1925 – April 19, 1985) was an American R&B singer, songwriter and pianist.

Born and brought up in Hollywood, Memphis, Tennessee, he had become known as a singer and pianist by the time he moved to Chicago in 1942. He formed a group, the Blues Rockers, and in 1949 began recording for Aristocrat Records and then Chess Records.

 

 After military service he became a popular entertainer in Chicago’s Black Belt. His biggest success came in 1952 when his debut solo release, "I Don't Know", written by Cripple Clarence Lofton (who received no royalties), topped the Billboard R&B chart for eight weeks. It was one of the most popular releases of its era and was Chess's biggest hit in the period before the successes of Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley. It was also one of the first R&B hit records to be covered by a leading white artist, Tennessee Ernie Ford. Mabon's original was played on Alan Freed's early radio shows and also sold well to white audiences, crossing over markets at the start of the rock and roll era.

Mabon returned to the top R&B slot in 1953 with "I'm Mad" and had another hit in 1954 with the Mel London song "Poison Ivy".  Throughout his Chess tenure, piano and sax were consistently to the fore rather than guitar and harp, emphasizing Mabon's cool R&B approach. His original version of Willie Dixon's hoodoo-driven "The Seventh Son" bombed in 1955, as did the remainder of his fine Chess catalogue. Mabon never regained his momentum after leaving Chess and record releases in the late 1950s on various labels were largely unsuccessful.

He stopped at Federal in 1957, Mad in 1960, Formal in 1962 (where he stirred up some local sales with his leering "Got to Have Some"), and USA in 1963-1964. Mabon sat out much of the late '60s. but came back strong after moving to Paris in 1972.

During the 70s and 80s, he would flit back and forth between Chicago and Europe, making occasional albums for German and French labels, most of which were poorly received. He toured and recorded in Europe as part of promoter Jim Simpson's American Blues Legends tour, recording The Comeback for Simpson's Big Bear Records and an album for Ornament Records in 1977.

He found a wider audience in Europe, playing the Montreux Jazz Festival and festivals in Berlin and Holland. A polished performer, with a measure of glossy sophistication to his singing, Mabon retained a strong affinity with the earthier aspects of the blues and was an influence upon Mose Allison.

 

He died in April 1985, after a long illness, in Paris. He is buried at Burr Oak Cemetery in Alsip, Cook County, Illinois.

(Info mainly edited from Wikipedia & All music)

Dory Previn born 22 October 1925

Dory Previn (October 22, 1925 – February 14, 2012) was an American lyricist, singer-songwriter and poet.

She was born Dorothy Veronica Langan at Rahway, New Jersey, on October 22 1925, the daughter of an Irish Catholic labourer. She once said: “I was raised with fear of God, guilt over Jesus and terror of the Devil,” adding that when she went to confession as a child, if she could not think of any sins to confess she would make some up.

Her father was unstable, and is said once to have held the family at gunpoint having boarded up their home. He also loved music and forced his daughter to take singing and dancing lessons. Though his talents were little to boast about, she was performing at local nightclubs by the age of 11.

After finishing high school, Dory went to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York, which she had to leave after only a year because she was unable to pay her way. Instead she worked as a chorus girl around the clubs in Manhattan . She appeared in the musical comedy Top Banana, with Phil Silvers, but was sacked; with time on her hands she tried writing short stories and lyrics for songs.

In the mid-1950s she was back singing on the club circuit, performing popular songs to which she had added her own verses. When in 1959 examples of her lyrics reached Arthur Freed, the producer of An American in Paris and Singin’ in the Rain, he hired her as a junior writer at MGM.

Her first brief was to write the lyrics for The Subterraneans (1960), a picture based on the novel by Jack Kerouac. The film was about San Francisco’s beat colony, and featured a number of jazz composers, among them André Previn, who was also head of

MGM’s musical department. Dory and Previn married in November 1959.

When Dory Previn’s contract expired after six months, MGM did not renew it. But by now she and her husband were collaborating on theme and title songs for films made by other studios. They were nominated for Academy Awards for their songs A Faraway Part of Town, from the film Pepe (1960), and Second Chance, from Two For the Seesaw (1962). Her lyrics also accompanied Previn’s songs for Irma La Douce (1963), Goodbye Charlie (1964) and Inside Daisy Clover (1966), among other movies.

Dory Previn also worked with other songwriters. Her lyrics for John Williams’s theme song for Valley of the Dolls (1967) found much wider exposure when it became a hit for Dionne Warwick; and her collaboration with Fred Karlin on the song Come Saturday Morning, for The Sterile Cuckoo (1969), brought her a third Oscar nomination; it too became a bestselling single when recorded by The Sandpipers.

André Previn, meanwhile, was in demand internationally as a conductor; but because she suffered from a deep-seated phobia of air travel, she did not accompany him on his trips abroad. In 1969 he left her for the actress Mia Farrow, and the marriage was dissolved the following year. Dory was devastated.She suffered a breakdown, and on the recommendation of a psychiatrist began to write free verse, which she later set to music.

 

In the event, this sad episode was to make her career. Despite a chronic lack of self-confidence in her abilities as a songwriter, she was persuaded to submit a demo to the recording company Mediarts, which invited her to make an album.  The result was On My Way to Where, released in 1970. The songs addressed themes such as her relationship with her father and her loathing for the rituals of the Roman Catholic Church. Dory Previn followed up with Mythical Kings and Iguanas, which was even more successful, and Reflections in a Mud Puddle (both 1971).

Among Dory Previn’s other albums were Live at Carnegie Hall; Dory Previn; and We’re Children of Coincidence and Harpo Marx. A compilation, The Art of Dory Previn, was released in 2008.

In 1976 she published an autobiography, Midnight Baby. She last appeared in concert in 1988, in Dublin and at the Donmar Warehouse in London. In 1997 she collaborated with her former husband on The Magic Number, a piece performed by the New York Philharmonic.

 

For many years Dory Previn underwent psychoanalysis (which she described as “a beautiful odyssey”), and she also found solace in a Gestalt therapy group. Previn died, aged 86, on February 14, 2012, at her farm in Southfield, Massachusetts, where she lived with her husband, Joby Baker. (Info mainly edited from the Telegraph)

Lattie Moore born 17 October 1924

Lattie Harrison Moore (17th October 1924 in Scottsville, Kentucky - 13. June 2010 ) was an American Hillbilly and rockabilly singer and songwriter.

 

Lattie Harrison Moore was born in 1924 in Scottsville, Kentucky, to Dora and Homer Leo Moore -- his father was a tobacco farmer-turned-preacher. The young Moore had an interest in music at an early age and, as a boy, learned to play the guitar, mandolin, and upright bass. His first job out of school was as a projectionist at the local movie theater in Scottsville. As a teenager, he was an especially big fan of Gene Autry and the latter's country & western songs, and he also admired the work of Roy Acuff, Hank Snow, and others he heard on the Grand Ole Opry -- and a bit later, he added another name to that list who came ahead of all of the others: Hank Williams.

At age 19, he headed to Indianapolis, hitchhiking his way to the city where he felt he had a shot at making a living as a musician. He was drafted into the United States Navy around this time but didn't stay in the service very long, and Moore was back in Indiana by the end of 1944, playing small clubs and other minor venues. He was also married around this time, and later hosted a local radio show as well as working on the musical side of an act put together by aging cowboy movie star Lash LaRue. 

In 1951 he made his first record, Hideaway Heart/Married Troubles, for a local label, Arrow; collectors hunted for it for more than 50 years before a copy turned up. The following year, he tried again. In Nashville he met Frank Innocenti, one of the owners of Speed Records, coming out of the Ernest Tubb Record Shop, and auditioned for him there on the street. 

"The song was called Juke Joint Johnny," Innocenti told the rockabilly historian Martin Hawkins. "I thought it was so good I gave him a contract and cut it that very afternoon. No one in the band knew the song except Lattie and his lead player, so to fill up the sound I told the engineer to bring the drums in as loud as possible to fill out the sound of the piano. The song hit the jukeboxes fast and good. I think this was about the first rock'n'roll record out of Nashville, and in those early days we didn't know it."

 

                    

Juke Joint Johnny was hillbilly blues, its sound and structure redolent of the period and somewhat akin to a Hank Williams hit of a few years earlier, Honky Tonk Blues. Certainly Williams's influence – the deep blue tonality, the wordbreaks that are half hiccup, half yodel – runs wide and deep through Moore's work, whether in a jaunty love song like I'm Gonna Tell You Something or the wry hard-times reportage of I'm Not Broke, But I'm Badly Bent.

These were made for King Records, a Cincinnati-based company that was one of the most powerful promoters of country music and blues in the two decades following the Second World War. Moore cut about two dozen recordings for King, in two stints between 1953 and 1963. One of the best of them was Out of Control, a picture, drawn from life, of alcoholic excess, which Moore co-wrote with an expert in that field, the singer George Jones, who recorded it first. 

Others included (Here I Am) Drunk Again, written by a fellow country singer, Webb Pierce, an admirer of Moore's work, and If the Good Lord's Willing and the Creek Don't Rise. The Williams flavour was intensified by the presence on some of his sessions of Williams’ steel guitarist, Don Helms. 

Throughout the 1950s and 60s, Moore was heard on radio, and gave personal appearances, in Indiana, Ohio and Pennsylvania. His last recording was a 1971 album, You Can't Make Hay Pickin' Cotton. Evidently, by then he couldn't make hay singing country either, because he returned to Scottsville, where for a few years he worked in law enforcement. By now he was a figure of near-legendary status in record-collecting circles, his discs eagerly collected and lovingly reissued. He underwent laser surgery in 1986 for throat cancer and recovered from quadruple heart bypass surgery in 1999.

Melvin Grubbs with Lattie Moore

His wife, Mildred, to whom he was married for 58 years, died in 2003. Lattie Moore died June 13, 2010 at the Medical Centre, Bowling Green, Kentucky. He was 85. (Info edited from All Music & an obit by Tony Russell for the The Guardian)

Reginald Dixon born 16 October1904

Reginald Herbert Dixon, MBE, ARCM (16 October 1904 – 9 May 1985), was an English theatre organist who was primarily known for his position as organist at the Tower Ballroom, Blackpool, a position he held from March 1930 until March 1970. He made and sold more recordings than any other organist before him, or since. He was in high demand throughout the 1930s, 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s. During his fifty-year career he was one of the top-selling artists, his prolific output ranking alongside that of Victor Sylvester and Bing Crosby.

Although he earned the title Mr Blackpool, Dixon was born in Sheffield on October 16, 1904, to Richard and Agnes Dixon. His musical talents soon came to the fore and as a youngster he was a keen pianist, with an ambition to be a concert pianist.

He played church organs, before getting work playing piano for the silent films at the Stocksbridge Palace, Sheffield, for £3 per week. Later he played at the Chesterfield Picture House and Derby Regent, before moving to play the Wurlizter at the Victoria,

Preston, where he stayed for a short time and lost his job after a disagreement with the management. His lucky break came when he visited the Tower Ballroom with his girlfriend Vera and learned from the Tower's organist, Max Bruce, that a new organist would shortly be needed.  The Tower had installed an American-made Wurlitzer at a cost of about £10,000. It boasted many sounds of cathedral chimes, bird song and breaking waves. With its 1000 pipes, 1200 magnets, two keyboards and ten ranks of pipes, it was considered the best organ in the world.

He was asked at his audition if he could play dance music and said yes, although he was not sure that he could. Yet he got the job and started his first season in May, 1930. The Wurlizter, which had been proving difficult to handle, was mastered by Dixon and he went on to draw in the crowds to the Tower. He shared alternate spots with the Bertini Band in the thirties and later shared the stage for many years with the Charlie Barlow Band.

 

The start of a long and successful career co-incided with a lengthy happy marriage to Vera, whom he married at Preston Register Office shortly after his audition at the Tower. He did numerous broadcasts for the BBC and by the late thirties he notched up his 500th broadcast, playing to listeners worldwide. A new and much larger Wurlitzer was purchased for Dixon in the mid-thirties and built to his own specification. Organist Horace Finch took over the old machine, which moved to the Winter Gardens' Empress Ballroom.

In 1940, Dixon joined the R.A.F. During his time there, he was often called upon to entertain service personnel, and was still to be heard on radio occasionally, as well as playing for concerts at the Tower Ballroom. While in the RAF he attained the rank of Flying Officer, and he left the RAF as Squadron Leader. In 1946, he returned to the tower, and was busier than ever. In addition to his Tower broadcasts, he was also broadcasting from Europe.

 

                         Here's "Sabre Dance" from above E.P. 

In the fifties and sixties his broadcasts from the Tower included Blackpool Nights, with famous stars of the day. He played the Royal Command Performance from the Blackpool Opera House in 1955.

In 1956, the Tower Ballroom and organ were damaged in a fire and most of Dixon's sheet music was lost. The venue was closed and Dixon moved to the Empress Ballroom, until the Tower Ballroom was restored. He made a welcome return in 1958 with a rebuilt Wurlizter.

As well as playing popular music, Dixon was a classical pianist and he also worked for charities. He received the MBE in 1966 and switched on the illuminations the same year. Over the years, he sold many records, earning a Gold Disc in 1981.

At the age of 65, Dixon retired from his 40-year residency at the Tower and did an Easter farewell concert with the Northern Dance Orchestra and Vince Hill in 1970, when fans said a fond farewell. He continued to do the occasional charity show.

Dixon outlived his wife Vera and died in his sleep at the age of 80 on May 9, 1985.

(Info Wikipedia and  mainly from an article by Pamela Watford @ the stage.co.uk)