Lance LeRoy was a top music manager in Nashville, TN, and was the founder of the Lancer Agency. Among his clients was the famed guitarist Lester Flatt. Lance helped outline Mr. Flatt’s ca...
Ed Rizzuto was surrounded by music his entire life. As a young boy he started playing trombone, which he continued throughout high school and into his military service in the early 1950s....
Marvin Snyder became president of Rico Reeds in 1976, after managing the cane plantations, which were used to make the reeds. His father worked with the Lockie family, who owned a chain o...
John Eaton spent the latter part of the 1960s composing for electronic musical instruments such as early synthesizers developed by Robert Moog and Paul Ketoff. His microtonal music includ...
Norman Pickering had a storied career. He worked as instrument designer for the legendary C.G. Conn Company in Elkhart. He also played a large role in the audio engineering field with his...
Phillip Stanger began playing drums at an early age and took lessons from the famed percussionist, Roy Knapp. Phil remembers with great joy the first time he walked into Frank’s Drum Shop...
Crane Bodine’s father, Elmer, was a piano man who formed a retail store in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 1933. When Crane was 17 years old, he began working in the store. In 1962, he took ove...
Delores Rhoads began teaching music in 1939. Seventy years later when she was interviewed by NAMM, she was still teaching. After World War II Delores and her husband opened a small teachi...
Michael Kropp loved folk music for as far back as he could remember. As he grew up and played in various bands in the 1960s and 70s he also became involved with the music industry. After ...
Allen Toussaint represented one of the quintessential New Orleans sounds. Toussaint’s compositions and songs seamlessly blend blues, jazz, ragtime, R&B, and funk to create an amalgam ...
Ken Ingram served as Vice President of Sales and Marketing for the Selmer Company in Elkhart, Indiana. He enjoyed working with the dealers around the country and the staff at Selmer, whic...
Ruth Sibley Bensinger wrote a song called “So Long Sweetheart” when she was a teenager. The song was about lovers split by war. Members of her musically inclined family thought the song...
Don Banks was a band director who felt he could have more of an impact on music makers by providing them with quality instruments. In 1967 he opened Don Banks Music in Tampa, Florida to s...
Craig Schertz worked for Byerly Music in Peoria, Illinois and saw an opportunity to purchased two of the company’s ten locations when his boss and the current owner, Loren Zimmerman, was ...
Dave Pike made an indelible mark on jazz vibraphones! As a percussive based player, Dave wanted to play with both rhythm and pitch and to explore melodies within Bebop riffs. He played wi...
Richard Ellis was proud of the three main areas of his professional career; playing, teaching and selling musical instruments. As a teenager Richard traveled with a big band, playing danc...
DeWitt Scott knew about as much as a person can know about steel guitars! As a retailer he sold them, as a performer he played them, as a composer and author he wrote about them and as a ...
Ben Cauley can be heard on hundreds of Stax Record hits including those with Otis Redding. Ben was a member of Otis's backup band called the Bar-Kays, which originated as the horn sectio...
Yoshinori Kimbara was a former Yamaha Japan Corporation executive who worked under Genichi Kawakami beginning in the 1950s. He was the first general manager of the Yamaha Music Foundatio...
Lothar Seifert came from a family of musical instrument makers in the Kirchberg area of Germany. His father, Oskar, began making bows in 1924 and by 1932 had set up a workshop in Graslitz...
Ed Hendricks always enjoyed selling. After serving heroically in World War II, he worked in several Chicago-area department stores before being hired by Don Broman to work for Lyon & ...
Bill Tarpley remembered the stories his father used to tell him about the early days of the family music retail store in west Texas. Times were hard during the era of the dust bowls and d...
Joe Hume was a veteran school band director before he opened Hume Music located in Kansas. His love of school bands continued as a retailer and as such he established new bands and expand...
Bill Pritchard played in a military band while serving the United States for over 20 years. When he retired, he took up what he had loved to do during his service, repairing band instrume...
Walt Johnston was best known throughout the industry for his role in introducing the Pearl Drum Company to the United States. After a gig selling band instruments, Walt was hired by CMI t...
Buddy Emmons is on the short list of the most influential steel pedal guitarists in the world. Along with Alvino Rey and Speedy West, Buddy helped define the role of the instrument in pop...
Botso Korisheli was born in Georgia, Russia, and came to America to become a composer and music teacher. After teaching music in elementary school, Botso established the County Youth Sym...
Vic Firth was a classically trained timpanist, playing with a number of highly regarded symphonies around the world. Over the years he developed a few ideas that improved on the way malle...
Eric Glasnapp (1969-2015) was the archivist in the NAMM Resource Center, where he took part in the filming of 74 interviews during his short four months as an employee. He worked closely...
Ralph Zumpano worked in the Kenosha, Wisconsin, Leblanc plant most of his professional career. Ralph married Vito Pascucci’s sister and was alongside Vito from the very beginning of the o...
Van Alexander co-wrote “A-Tisket, A-Tasket” with Ella Fitzgerald while both worked in the Chick Webb Orchestra back in 1938. The success of that song led to a job as arranger for Webb as ...
William Petersen served as president of Selmer Corporation from 1975-1990 during a time of great growth. Bill took over as the head of the renowned band instrument company after the retir...
