Hunt, Pee Wee (Walter)
Hunt, Pee Wee (Walter)
Hunt, Pee Wee (Walter), trombonist, singer, leader; b. Mount Healthy, Ohio, May 10, 1907; d. Plymouth, Mass., June 22, 1979. Both of his parents were musicians; his father was a violinist, his mother a guitarist. After leaving high school in Columbus, Ohio, he studied at Ohio State Univ. He began playing banjo at 17, later graduated from the Cincinnati Cons. He played with local bands on banjo and trombone, then joined Jean Goldkette for a residency at the Pla-Mor Ballroom in Kansas City (late 1927 to early 1928). He later worked in the Hollywood Theatre Orch. in Detroit, then in 1929 became a founder-member of the Casa Loma Band (directed by Glen Gray), and was heavily featured on vocals (including a recorded duet with Louis Armstrong in 1939). He left Glen Gray in May 1943 and became a disc-jockey in Hollywood. He did regular freelancing playing, and after a spell with Freddie Fisher’s Band, he joined the U.S. Merchant Marine in early 1945. He formed his own small band in L.A. (1946) and achieved great success with his tongue-in-cheek record of “Twelfth Street Rag” (1948). He led his own quartet until the mid- 1950s, making similar ragtime-novelty recordings. Hunt was less active in the 1960s and 1970s.
Discography
Straight from Dixie (1950); Dixieland Detour (1952); Swingin’ Around (1954); Dixieland Classics (1955); Pee Wee and Fingers (1956).
—John Chilton who’s who of Jazz/Lewis Porter