Where I grew up, Bob Wills and his western swing was very popular. And western swing is not that far from jazz and blues.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
My primary influences were the best jazz players from the 50's and 60's and later some of the pop people from the same time period along with the better of the well known blues musicians.
Most of what I listen to now is mainstream jazz from 1935 right up to and including early bebop and cool jazz.
I've always loved jazz.
I also like Western classical music and jazz.
Jazz was the pop music of its day, and all American popular music has stemmed from it one way or another.
I liked the more sophisticated urban style of blues like Ray Charles and B. B. King, Bobby Blue Bland, Lou Rawls; people like that with more of a tendency toward jazz.
I always liked jazz. And my people liked the old blues, race records and the doo-wop and all that.
I got into trad jazz, then modern jazz, then avant-garde jazz, between the ages of 16 to 18.
My main influences have always been the classic jazz players who sang, like Louis Armstrong and Nat King Cole and Jack Teagarden.
Very few of the men whose names have become great in the early pioneering of jazz and of swing were trained in music at all. They were born musicians: they felt their music and played by ear and memory. That was the way it was with the great Dixieland Five.