Two months ago Pete Gallagher and I put together a presentation for the St. Petersburg Museum of History. We called it Cracker Jazz.

The evening featured three distinct events:

• a talk/play presentation about Cracker Jazz
• Randy Noles spoke about the Orange Blossom Special
• a concert, including Kristin Holloway and Mark Musser

There was some resistance to our idea. A prominent jazz afficianado objected to the term “cracker jazz.” For him, jazz is an uptown thing and we crackers should keep our hands off.

He was not aware, apparently, of that great album Hillbilly Jazz, which featured Vassar Clements.

Back in the days of vinyl, I gave this a lot of play. We did some tunes from it, I believe.

During the course of the talk presentation, I also tipped my hat to George Custer, the Florida fiddler who got his swing inspiration from Joe Venuti first hand.

Pete and I will be doing some of this material on the 18th for our show at Boca Grande.

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