[Dixielandjazz] FW: Emailing: Frank Driggs, Jazz Age Historian and Photo Collector, Dies at 81 - NYTimes.com

[Norman Vickers]

To:  Musicians & Jazzfans list, DJML

From: Norman Vickers, Jazz Society of Pensacola

 

I sent something out from JazzTimes a few days ago,  But this NYTimes article  from 9-25 has additional information, so I pass it along, too.  Thanks to Mike Lynch, Jack Mazzanovich and Charlie Suhor from bringing to my attention.

 

 


Frank Driggs, Collector of Jazz Photos, Dies at 81


By MARGALIT FOX <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/f/margalit_fox/index.html?inline=nyt-per> 


Published: September 25, 2011 


Frank Driggs, a writer, historian and record producer who amassed what is considered the finest collection of jazz photographs in the world, was found dead on Tuesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 81. 

Enlarge This Image <javascript:pop_me_up2('http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2011/09/26/arts/driggs-obit.html','driggs_obit_html','width=491,height=630,scrollbars=yes,toolbars=no,resizable=yes')> 

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Marilynn K. Yee/The New York Times


Frank Driggs in 2005 in his Greenwich Village home with some of nearly 100,000 photographs and Jazz Age memorabilia. More Photos » <wlmailhtml://slideshow/2011/09/25/arts/music/DRIGGS.html>  


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 <http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2011/09/25/arts/music/DRIGGS.html?ref=music> SLIDE SHOW: Frank Driggs Collection


The latest on the arts, coverage of live events, critical reviews, multimedia extravaganzas and much more. 

His death, apparently of natural causes, was confirmed by Mark Waldstein, a lawyer who has worked with him. 

In a series of bulging file cabinets in his Greenwich Village home, Mr. Driggs tenderly kept nearly 100,000 images, alphabetized by subject. To open any drawer was to be immersed in a world of spats, smoke and speakeasies, a world in which musicians routinely went on tour packing pistols to protect themselves from highway brigands. 

His files groaned with the famous (more than 1,500 pictures of Duke Ellington, more than 500 of Count Basie), but they did not slight the obscure, including Countess Johnson, a vibrant Kansas City pianist who died young, of tuberculosis, in 1939. 

Mr. Driggs also owned many sound recordings — to him, there was no number lovelier than 78 — and other permanent ephemera, like ticket stubs, posters and sheet music. As a whole, the Frank Driggs Collection was valued at $1.5 million, The New York Times reported in 2005 <http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/01/nyregion/01jazz.html> . 

But it was the photographs that formed its vast, vast bulk. These Mr. Driggs supplied for a fee — provided he took a liking to the person making the request — to newspapers, magazines and television programs, conducting his business by telephone, electric typewriter and, more boldly in recent years, by fax machine. 

Mr. Driggs was a major contributor of still images, for instance, to “Jazz,” <http://www.pbs.org/jazz/>  Ken Burns’s multipart TV documentary, first broadcast in 2001. 

Many of Mr. Driggs’s photos had been given to him by the musicians themselves during the decades he haunted New York jazz clubs. Others were publicity stills that he liberated — they were, by his own account, orphans being callously cast aside — from the files of Columbia Records, where he was once a producer. 

He trafficked in photographs from other genres too, like rock and country, because the market would bear them even if he personally could not. Visiting Mr. Driggs for a 2005 profile <http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/jazzman.html> , a writer for Smithsonian magazine noted that in one cabinet Billy Strayhorn <http://www.billystrayhorn.com/1997/biography.htm> , the composer of “Lush Life” and “Take the A Train,” sat in front of Barbra Streisand. 

“As well he should,” Mr. Driggs muttered in reply. 

Mr. Driggs sometimes said he wished he had been born in 1890, so that he might have spent a halcyon young manhood in the Jazz Age. To his lifelong regret, Franklin Swan Driggs was born in 1930, on Jan. 29. He spent his early childhood in Manchester, Vt., where his father was a jazz musician. 

An amateur trumpeter and fervent listener, Frank Driggs earned a bachelor’s degree in political science from Princeton in 1952 before moving to New York. He eventually joined Columbia Records, where he was primarily responsible for rereleasing old 78 records by some of the titans of the field. 

Among the critically praised compilations Mr. Driggs produced was “Robert Johnson: King of the Delta Blues Singers,” released in two volumes, in 1961 and 1970. 

The author of a profusion of liner notes, Mr. Driggs also wrote two books, “Black Beauty, White Heat: A Pictorial History of Classic Jazz, 1920-1950” (1982, with Harris Lewine) and “Kansas City Jazz: From Ragtime to Bebop — A History” (2005, with Chuck Haddix). 

Mr. Driggs’s wife, the former Shirley Kwartler, died more than 20 years ago. His longtime companion, Joan Peyser <http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/25/arts/music/joan-peyser-bernstein-and-gershwin-biographer-dies-at-80.html> , the biographer of Leonard Bernstein and other musicians, died in April. Survivors include a stepbrother, Donald Brodie; a half sister, Jean Pfister; three stepchildren, Dean Melgar, Reade Melgar and Carla Sheil; step-grandchildren; step-great-grandchildren; and step-great-great-grandchildren. 

Although Mr. Driggs talked publicly several years ago about selling his collection one day, in the end he did not — partly, it appeared, because he simply could not. 

“I’ve collected this stuff,” he told National Public Radio <http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4534453>  in 2005, “and I’m sure I’ll keep collecting till they lay me down.” 


A version of this article appeared in print on September 26, 2011, on page D8 of the New York edition with the headline: Frank Driggs, Collector Of Jazz Photos, Dies at 81.