[Dixielandjazz] Willie the Lion Smith

[ROBERT R. CALDER]

The Lion does go on duly about his various ancestry, but he was eight rather 
than four years older than Louis. I'm not sure how the long-standing notion that 
he was born in 1897 got about, and it certainly caused me considerable 
puzzlement reading his memoirs of New York before he joined the army. The birth 
certificate evidence evidence now accessible on the Morton site (William Henry 
Smith, born 1893) makes him seventeen in 1910 and gives him time to have seen 
and heard what he refers to. 

He joins the operatic bass Boris Christoff as someone who had a musical career 
claiming to be four years younger than he was. 

Quite why Eubie Blake came to represent himself as four years older than he was 
is a mystery, although he did so for the first time only when he remarried 
in 1946, which might I could joke bear some relation to his previous life as a 
Don Juan. Did he know he was going to see his 96th birthday and fancy making 
more of a spectacle of it by being regarded as a centenarian then and for the 
following week or so, after which he departed this life?  

And then there was Mieczyslav Horszowski, who began his last public statement by 
saying he felt fine, and didn't want his friends to be worried, it was just that 
there seemed to be something ridiculous about his performing a concert on the 
day to celebrate the centenary of his own birth, and that was the only reason he 
was cancelling it. 

British TV this coming week will be showing a documentary film asking whether 75 
is the new 40.