📍Cheraw, SC 29520, USA
1917 – 1935“I was born John Birks Gillespie in October 1917 in Cheraw, a small town on the Pee Dee River in north-eastern South Carolina, the youngest of nine children of James and Lottie Gillespie. My father was a bricklayer who also led a local band, and he kept the band's instruments at our house, so I grew up surrounded by pianos, drums and horns. He was strict and sometimes harsh, and he died when I was about ten, and times were hard for my mother after that. I started picking out tunes on the piano at four, and by twelve I had taught myself trombone and trumpet. My teacher at Cheraw's segregated school, Alice Wilson, started me on music in her school band, and I listened to Roy Eldridge on the radio and tried to play like him. I was a mischievous boy, always clowning and fighting, which is how I got the name Dizzy later on. At about fifteen I won a scholarship to the Laurinburg Institute, a Black boarding school across the border in North Carolina, because they needed a trumpet player for the band, and there I studied piano and harmony, learning how music was built. In 1935 my family moved to Philadelphia, and I left Laurinburg to join them and play music. I went on to New York, played with Cab Calloway, and with Charlie Parker created bebop, and brought Afro-Cuban rhythms into jazz. Cheraw has never forgotten me: it has a park with a statue of me playing my bent trumpet, and the town celebrates my music every year.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today