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We discussed his memory of coming to Sedalia by train from the Kerrville festival with Dick Wellstood and Terry related his experience in the Kerrville piano playing contest. I first got in touch with him the year before about performing at the first Joplin Festival and he graciously agreed. With the exception of Bill Bolcom, I had really only met the older performers. Terry Waldo at the 1974 Scott Joplin Ragtime Festival (Photo: Larry Meton)Īs I was planning to produce the first 1974 ragtime festival in Sedalia, I asked Trebor Tichenor, Max Morath, and Dick Zimmerman about young performers to invite. He has gathered an enormous collection of these oral histories that he uses in his media programs and publications. Terry was in San Francisco three or four times and in addition to performing as he has done throughout his career, Terry took every opportunity to do recorded interviews with personalities of interest. Al Rose Collection, Hogan Jazz Archive, Special Collections, Howard-Tilton Memorial Library. Edmond Souchon, aboard the Goldenrod Showboat, St. Jean Kittrell with Don Franz, Terry Waldo on tuba, and Dr. Turk didn’t like his tenor banjo but allowed him to play, nonetheless.
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In San Francisco he met Turk Murphy and played intermission banjo for him at Earthquake McGoon’s. He was like having only one stand-in actor for all the roles in a play. This meant since Terry played so many instruments, he could fill for many different parts.
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Terry’s instrumental versatility got him gig’s playing 15-minute breaks for the group’s regular instrumentalists. He had rehearsed with the Red Garter Jazz Band in Chicago before going to New Orleans. Prior to that he had played the Red Garter Saloon franchises in New Orleans with the old timers there like Pops Foster, and then in 1965 he made his first trip to the San Francisco Red Garter Saloon. I asked him about that era of his career, and he said he had been in St. I first heard Terry in 1969 on the Goldenrod Showboat at the 5th annual National Ragtime Festival. Larry Melton: Neal Siegal and I are great fans of Waldo’s and since he is such an enormous personality, we decided to tag team Terry and write about his career for TST readers from our personal experiences and interviews with him. Astonishingly, he is classically trained and plays a variety of instruments in addition to his piano mastery and especially enjoys playing banjo and tuba. He is known not only for these many talents but also for his spontaneously earthy, nouveau-Vaudevillian wit that endears him to his audiences and friends. It would be impossible to enumerate of all of Terry Waldo’s achievements as a historian, writer, theatrical music director, producer, pianist, vocalist, composer, and educator. Then in the late eighties, Waldo moved to New York and has been playing in popular clubs and venues since while maintaining his connections back in Ohio.
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For over a decade he often performed with Susan LaMarche. His book by the same name followed and Terry settled into a rapidly emerging career with his base back in Columbus. By 1974 Terry produced his famous 26-part NPR series, “This is Ragtime,” and he became a celebrity in his own right.