Jazz icon John Birks Gillespie was born in 1917 in Cheraw, population ca. 3,500--a small cotton town less than ten miles south of the North Carolina border. When he finally left Cheraw--to attend college on a horn scholarship--he'd move just thirty miles north, to the all-black Laurinburg Institute in Laurinburg, North Carolina.
Shortly thereafter, his widowed mother moved up to Philadelphia to live with her sister, and John Birks headed there when he finished at the institute. In Philly, he got into a band, and the rest is Jazz history.
Cheraw Childhood
The youngest of nine children, Gillespie's career as a professional entertainer began years before his career as a musician--as a small boy, he'd dance for money upstairs in the ballroom at Cheraw's (otherwise) all-white Chiquola Club.
When Dizzy was 10, his father, James, died
suddenly from asthma, and the Gillespies were plunged
into severe poverty. His mother, Lottie, took on work as a maid and laundress, and each
child tried to make whatever money he or she could. When he wasn't out dancing
for money, Dizzy had taken to sneaking into the Lyric Theatre (now the Theatre
on the Green) and watching cliffhangers. He got so good at it that the theater
owner finally hired him to keep other kids from doing the same thing. As
payment, Dizzy got to watch all the movies he wanted.
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| Cheraw High, site of Dizzy's first paying gig. |
Around 1930, a next-door neighbor brought home a trumpet, and--upon
hearing it, John Birks--who had already picked up the trombone and dabbled with
the piano--decided that he'd found his true instrument.
Gillespie appeared in minstrel shows put on
by Alice Wilson, his music teacher at the all-black Robert Smalls School on Front
Street. He later played his first paid gig for the students at Cheraw's white high school.
In 1933,
Gillespie left Cheraw to attend the Laurinburg Institute on a band scholarship.Forty years later, an interviewer noted that Gillespie always specified that he was from Cheraw South Carolina, not North Carolina. Half jokingly, he asked Gillespie what difference it made which Carolina he was from. Was there even a difference?
Dizzy's response was telling. Even after decades of border-blurring world travel, the native Sandlapper became thoughtful and explained that the difference was actually quite distinct: "It's funny...right across the state line, they have their own ways. In different states, you find different mores of society."
For the record, Gillespie didn't pick up his famed nickname until long after his days in Cheraw. Until his death, whenever he came back to visit, old friends and family in Cheraw continued to call him "John Birks."
