Birmingham pianist, bandleader, and regional featherweight boxing champion, Noel “Kid” Ray, with his band, 1920s. Ray later moved to Gadsden, Alabama, to pursue a career in radio broadcasting.
Army band practice at Camp McClellan, near Anniston, Alabama, in a 1918 postcard. The Southern Music Research Center archive includes two copies of this postcard. One, addressed to Miss Mary Sewell in Jacksonville, Alabama and signed "Your classmate…
The Stardusters, German POW band at Camp Aliceville. The Aliceville POW camp, which operated from December 1942 – September 1945, offered its prisoners a range of cultural activities, including musical and theatrical groups, college-level courses…
Draper Prison Band at Alabama State Capitol, Montgomery. Press photo, September 1953. Newspaper caption: “Prison band whoops it up—It has become customary for the Draper Prison band to play in the Capitol rotunda the closing night of the legislative…
Jane Elmore, age 10, plays piano at the Crippled Children’s Clinic, Birmingham, Alabama. Press photo, 1951. Also pictured are Sylvia Whitlow, Cary Ussery, and Larry Woods.
Attendee Pearl Benson at Birmingham’s Festival of Sacred Music, press photo, 1963. Birmingham’s third annual Festival of Sacred Music opened on November 26, 1963, with an emotional “farewell” to President John F. Kennedy, who had been killed just a…
Florence Golson Bateman (1891-1987) was a noted soprano and composer. Her compositions include The Bird with a Broken Wing (which she dedicated to Helen Keller) and A Spring Symphony. Bateman was posthumously inducted to the Alabama Women's Hall of…
Organ tuner and jack-of-all-trades, Dewey Gibson of Evergreen, Alabama, 1968.
Dewey Gibson was an itinerant piano tuner, organist, preacher, poet, typewriter repairman, ironing board manufacturer, and all-purpose mechanic. A husband and father of…
Born in Texas, St. Elmo Johnson was a classically trained violinist, conductor, choir director, and arranger. By 1927, he was a central figure in Rev. George Wilson Becton’s Gospel Feast Party. Becton, a sensational and flamboyant Harlem evangelist,…