Pee Wee Hunt
Pee Wee Hunt (May 10, 1907, Mount Healthy, Ohio – June 22, 1979 in Plymouth, Massachusetts), born Walter Gerhardt Hunt, was a jazz trombonist, vocalist and band leader.
Hunt developed musical interest at an early age, since his mother played the banjo and his father played violin. The teenage Hunt was a banjoist with a local band while he was attending college at Ohio State University where he majored in Electrical Engineering,[1] and during his college years he switched from banjo to trombone. he graduated from the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music.[1] He joined Jean Goldkette's Orchestra in 1928.[1]
Pee Wee Hunt was the co-founder and featured trombonist with the Casa Loma Orchestra, but he left the group in 1943 to work as a Hollywood radio disc jockey before joining the Merchant Marine near the end of World War II.[1] He returned to the West Coast music scene in 1946. His "Twelfth Street Rag" was a number one hit in September 1948. He was satirized as Pee Wee Runt and his All-Flea Dixieland Band in Tex Avery's animated MGM cartoon Dixieland Droopy (1954).
At age 72, Hunt died after a long illness in Plymouth, Massachusetts, where his Casa Loma partner Glen Gray also lived.
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