Earl 'Fatha' Hines

Earl Kenneth Hines was born on December 28, 1903, in Duquesne, Pennsylvania, into a musical household. His father, Joseph Hines, worked as a foreman at the coal docks, played the cornet, and led the Eureka Brass Band in the Pittsburgh area. Earl's birth mother died when he was about three years old, and he was raised chiefly by his father and his stepmother, Mary, a church organist who gave the boy his first piano lessons and taught him to read music with unusual fluency.

Turning from classical study toward jazz, Hines formed his own trio in his teens and, at seventeen, joined Lois Deppe's Serenaders in Pittsburgh, making his earliest recordings. By the mid-1920s he had moved to Chicago, the crucible of the young jazz world, where he played with the Carroll Dickerson Orchestra and forged a historic partnership with trumpeter Louis Armstrong. Their 1928 duet "Weather Bird" remains a landmark of the music.

That same year Hines opened at Chicago's Grand Terrace Cafe, leading his own orchestra there for more than a decade. His revolutionary "trumpet-style" piano — single-note lines cutting through the beat with the attack of a horn — reshaped how the instrument was played. In the 1940s his band became a nursery for the coming revolution, giving early homes to Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and the young singer Billy Eckstine.

After a quieter stretch in the 1950s, Hines was triumphantly rediscovered in 1964 and toured the world as an elder master until his death on April 22, 1983, in Oakland, California. From coal-town parlor to the world's great stages, Fatha Hines carried the joy of the keyboard across sixty years — and we honor the hands that taught a whole tradition how to sing.