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Jazz

  • Little is known about tuba player Pete Briggs, one of the earliest musicians from South Carolina to make a name for themselves.
  • Earnest Evans, born in the Spring Gully community of Georgetown, SC, is better known by his equally alliterative stage name: Chubby Checker.
  • Singer and guitarist Freddie 'Pepper' Green was born in Charleston, SC in 1911.
  • The Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes considered Charleston-born jazz and blues vocalist Bertha "Chippie" Hill to be one of the 12 greatest African American folk singers.
  • Trumpeter, impresario, writer, and jazz advocate and historian, Jack McCray, was a native of Charleston, SC.
  • Houston Person, the tenor sax master, was born in 1934 in Florence, SC.
  • A disabled Gullah beggar riding through old Charleston, SC, on a goat-drawn cart tries to save a beautiful and troubled young woman from thugs and pushers. That might sound like a strange idea for an opera, but that is the plot of "Porgy and Bess," perhaps the greatest American opera written.
  • Bebop jazz trumpeter and composer Pete Minger was born George Allen Minger on January 22, 1953 in Orangeburg, SC.
  • If you were lucky enough to attending the Main Street Jazz Festival in Columbia, SC, in the early 1990s, you likely heard a young Christ Potter blow you away on the saxophone.
  • Jazz has many fathers, and has fathered many children in the musical family tree. Mingled in the roots and branches of that tree is soul music — and we in South Carolina lay claim to the very "Godfather of Soul," James Brown.