In Boysie’s Horn, social historian, radio host, producer, journalist, and novelist Steven Leech highlights the influence of one of America’s greatest jazz educators, Boysie Lowrie, in making African American Wilmington, Delaware a launchpad for national performers like vibraphonist Lem Winchester, trumpeter Clifford Brown, and vocalist Betty Roché. Reaching back to the turn of the twentieth century, Leech traces the social foundation and dynamic personalities who made Wilmington, like New Orleans and Kansas City, a place where Jazz came from. We meet bandleader Sam Wooding, who abandoned his career in pre-World War II Europe for one as a music teacher at Wilmington’s Howard High when Clifford Brown was a student there.
Leech also traces the systematic racism and economic forces that undermined Wilmington’s cultural vibrance and led to the demise of the numerous jazz venues that had kept Wilmington jumpin’ for eight decades.
Jazz fans and researchers will delight in all the artists Leech name checks in this well-indexed record of bands, clubs, musicians, and social movers.
This is a story that has needed to be told for a long time.
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Steven Leech was born in Wilmington. In the mid 1970s, he began writing for The Delaware Spectator, published by Ralph Morris, who is considered to be the Dean of Delaware Black Journalism. In 1976, along with Morris and Herman Holloway Jr, he helped found The Delaware Star, the successor to The Delaware Spectator, and served as Managing Editor. When The Delaware Star became The Delaware Valley Star, Wilmington’s final weekly newspaper, with new publisher Felix Stickney, Steven Leech became Editor, serving at times in that capacity with Ralph Morris and Maurice Sims.Steven Leech’s articles have appeared in Out & About magazine and The Delaware State News with op-eds in The Wilmington News Journal and The Philadelphia Inquirer. Since 1980 he has served as an editor for Dreamstreets, a local literary publication and radio program. He has written extensively about the history of Delaware literary art culminating with his book Valdemar’s Corpse.Steven Leech is in radio station WVUD’s Hall of Fame. From WVUD, the University of Delaware radio station, he regularly broadcasts his radio program Boptime and often plays recordings from Wilmington jazz, R&B, and rock n’ roll performers from the past.Steven Leech currently lives in a cramped apartment in suburban New Castle County where he staves off poverty and communes with the ineffably divine spirit dreaming in every living being.
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