He’s got the whole band swinging his song of educated jazz while he keeps blowing the roundest, downest, bluest and coolest of sounds.
–Lionel Hampton, “Show Biz Buzzes” (on tenor saxophonist Jay Peters)
Jay Peters, who directed bands at George Mason and Bowler in Richmond Public Schools in the early 1950s, was not the most influential or longest serving music educator in RPS. David Williams “taught in Richmond Public Schools for fifty years and had perfect attendance,” educator and trombonist Charles Newton told me. And of course, band and orchestra director Joe Kennedy Jr. would go on to become Richmond’s first Black supervisor of music and taught at Virginia Commonwealth University and Virginia Tech.
No, Peters’s significance is the archetype he represents of a mid-century jazz educator in Virginia. And that he turned up “swinging his song of educated jazz” at just the right time and place.
The decade following World War II was one of quantum leaps—in atomic energy, in international relations, and in the increasingly powerful movement for Black American civil rights across the South.
1946’s Morgan v. Virginia struck down a law requiring racial segregation on commercial interstate busses a decade before the Montgomery bus boycott. In January 1951, the Richmond branch of the NAACP declared all-out war on segregation in public assembly, boycotting performances by major stars—Black and white—at the Mosque theater. And just three months later, two teenage girls from Farmville called up civil rights attorney Oliver W. Hill to report on their student walkout in protest of the derelict Moton High School facilities. That call led to the case Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward which, bundled with four others, was decided by the US Supreme Court in 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, declaring (though not enforcing) an end to the “separate but equal” doctrine in public education.
The first mention of Jay Peters in the local press also came from Farmville, three years before Barbara Johns’s fateful phone call to Hill.
In between the war and his stint teaching in Richmond Public Schools, Peters finished his music education degree at Virginia State College, studying with renowned teachers like conductor F. Nathaniel Gatlin (a graduate of Oberlin and Northwestern, with an Ed.D. from Columbia University) and music theorist Undine Smith Moore (a graduate of Fisk with a Masters from Teachers College). Peters was gifted enough to be chosen by Gatlin as a soloist with the concert band. He even performed on violin in VSC’s “Little Symphony Orchestra,” a precursor to the Petersburg Symphony, also founded by Gatlin. But by the time he arrived in Virginia, Peters already had a wealth of musical experience under his fingers.
Jay Jeremiah Peters Jr. (December 21, 1926 to January 19, 1974) came from Chicago, where he performed on tenor saxophone with the Dukes of Swing. He joined Lionel Hampton’s orchestra in March of 1945 and the next month recorded the “All American Award Concert” at Carnegie Hall with Hampton, Dizzy Gillespie and Dinah Washington.
At the time he was drafted by the US Army (enlisted June 14, 1945; discharged November 18, 1946), Peters was working in Floyd Ray’s orchestra at 6671 Sunset Boulevard, the famed “Crossroads of the World,” in Los Angeles. He attended Roosevelt College (Chicago), Howard University (Washington, DC), and eventually finished his bachelor’s degree at VSC in Ettrick (near Petersburg), Virginia. He taught music in Richmond Public Schools for three and a half years, rejoining Hampton’s band in December 1953.
Peters performed with Hampton in February 1954 at New York’s Apollo Theatre alongside Dick Twardzik, Herb Pomeroy, and Betty Carter. From 1954 to 1955, he toured Europe and the United States (including the Deep South) with Hampton in a band that included Nat Adderley, recording extensively on European labels Philips, Stunt, RST, First Heard, and Saga. After leaving the Hampton orchestra, Peters returned to Chicago where he recorded for Argo and Chess Records and performed with Kenny Dorham, Yusef Lateef, Bunky Green, Billy Wallace, Julian Priester, and Von Freeman.
While teaching in (thoroughly segregated) Richmond Public Schools, Jay Peters had an impact on two youngsters who would go on to influence the shape of jazz and jazz education to come—keyboardist Lonnie Liston Smith Jr. and reedman George “Poochie” Ross.
Smith, born in Richmond in 1940, earned a Bachelor’s degree in Music Education from Morgan State University and performed with Betty Carter, Art Blakey, and Miles Davis, among others. His original music with the Cosmic Echoes has influenced the genres of smooth jazz, jazz funk, acid jazz, and hip hop. “When I was in middle school,” Smith told me, “we had a band director and he had just come off the road playing with Lionel Hampton”:
He was our band director. Jay Peters was a tenor player and he had been on the road with Lionel Hampton. But I guess he had decided to come back home and he started teaching school. So, that was a great influence. I guess that gave us more freedom and everything.
“Jay Peters, an outstanding tenor saxophonist who performed with Lionel Hampton, started George on saxophone,” Joe Kennedy told the Richmond Times Dispatch on the occasion of Poochie Ross’s funeral in January of 1993. “Jay Peters said that he was one of the most gifted students he had ever come in contact with.” Ross’s jazz education bona fides were significant, having earned a D.M.A. from Eastman, directed the Jazz Ensemble at Indiana University (one of the jazz education movement’s major institutional headquarters), and initiated the Jazz Studies degree program at the University of Maryland College Park, where he mentored a young Terell Stafford.
Just one month before the Warren court handed down its landmark decision in Brown v. Board, Peters played a benefit for the NAACP Richmond branch. Their 1951 boycott of the Mosque theater sent shockwaves through the national Association and eventually pressured figures like Marian Anderson and Duke Ellington to included non-segregation clauses in their contracts. Assistant Special Counsel to the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund Robert L. Carter believed the theater desegregation movement throughout the South “may make those Justices, who are worried about what will happen if they outlaw segregation in the elementary and secondary schools, feel more sanguine about rendering a decision favorable to us.”
Who knows what impact one teacher makes on the world? They plant seeds that flourish elsewhere, that then seed other territories. Jay Peters was a veteran—of Chicago swing, of the US Army, of Virginia State College’s world-class music education program. Historians ought to pay attention to such educators, as hindsight clarifies the societal growth they foster.
What Peters offered his students and his community is difficult to measure, but clearly meaningful. It spurred Lonnie Liston Smith Jr. and George Ross to commit their lives to music and education. It was valued by Richmond school leaders and the civil rights community. His family carries this torch, as well, that illuminates the role of arts education in fostering community cultural integrity. Daughter Jacqueline Celeste Peters, educational director at the DuSable Museum in Chicago, curated the “Musics of Struggle” program at the 1990 Smithsonian Festival of American Folklife.
The seeds of change start small. Let’s shed a little light.