📍1934 Grand Avenue, Davenport, IA 52803, USA
1903 – 1921“I was born Leon Bismark Beiderbecke in March 1903 in the house at 1934 Grand Avenue, a comfortable Victorian house on a hill in Davenport, Iowa, above the Mississippi River. My family were prosperous German-Americans; my father, Bismark, ran a lumber and coal business, and my mother, Agatha, played the church organ and the piano. Everyone called me Bix, and as a little boy I could pick out on the piano any tune I heard, even before I could reach the pedals; the local paper wrote about the seven-year-old who could play by ear. I took piano lessons, but I would never read the music properly; I played what I heard. When my brother came home from the war with a record player and records by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, I was hooked, and I taught myself the cornet, picking out Nick LaRocca's solos note by note. In the summers I went down to the levee to hear the jazz bands on the Mississippi riverboats that came up from New Orleans, and that's where I heard Louis Armstrong for the first time, playing on one of the boats. I cared about music far more than school, and I failed my classes at Davenport High School. In 1921 my parents sent me to Lake Forest Academy, near Chicago, hoping I'd settle down, but Chicago was full of jazz, and I spent my nights on the South Side. in 1922 the academy sent me home for good, and I joined the Wolverines, then played with Paul Whiteman's orchestra, and recorded Singin' the Blues and In a Mist. My boyhood home is on the National Register of Historic Places, and Davenport holds a jazz festival in my memory every summer.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today