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John William Tuohy lives in Washington DC

Leon Bismark "Bix" Beiderbecke




Leon Bismark "Bix" Beiderbecke (March 10, 1903 – August 6, 1931) was a jazz cornetist, pianist, composer and one of the most influential jazz soloists of the 1920s, a cornet player noted for an inventive lyrical approach and purity of tone.
Beiderbecke taught himself to play the cornet largely by ear, leading him to adopt a non-standard fingering technique that informed his unique style.
Beiderbecke's most influential recordings date from his time with Goldkette and Whiteman, although he also recorded under his own name and that of Trumbauer's. The Whiteman period marked a precipitous decline in his health due to his increasing use of alcohol. Treatment for alcoholism in rehabilitation centers, with the support of Whiteman and the Beiderbecke family, failed to stop his decline. He left the Whiteman band in 1929 and in the summer of 1931 he died in his Sunnyside, Queens, New York apartment at the age of 28.
He composed or played on recordings that are jazz classics and standards such as "Davenport Blues", "In a Mist", "Copenhagen", "Riverboat Shuffle", "Singin' the Blues", and "Georgia On My Mind".
Beiderbecke died in his apartment,  in Sunnyside, Queens, New York on August 6, 1931. The week had been stiflingly hot, making sleep difficult. Suffering from insomnia, Beiderbecke played the piano late into the evenings, both to the annoyance and the delight of his neighbors.

 On the evening of August 6, at about 9.30 pm, his rental agent, George Kraslow, heard noises coming from across the hallway. "His hysterical shouts brought me to his apartment on the run," Kraslow told Philip Evans in 1959.

He pulled me in and pointed to the bed. His whole body was trembling violently. He was screaming there were two Mexicans hiding under his bed with long daggers. To humor him, I looked under the bed and when I rose to assure him there was no one hiding there, he staggered and fell, a dead weight, in my arms. I ran across the hall and called in a woman doctor, Dr. Haberski, to examine him. She pronounced him dead.

Historians have disagreed over the identity of the doctor who pronounced Beiderbecke dead, with several sources stating that it was Dr. John Haberski - the husband of the woman Kraslow identified - who pronounced Beiderbecke dead in his apartment.
The official cause of death, as indicated on the death certificate, was lobar pneumonia. Unofficially, edema of the brain coupled with the effects of long-term alcoholism have been cited as contributory factors.