Eddie Preston: Texas Trumpeter Fallen Through the Cracks Dave Oliphant
Eddie Preston: Texas Trumpeter Fallen Through the Cracks Dave Oliphant 8 Photo of Eddie Preston from the album Charles Mingus in Paris. Courtesy Christian Rose and Sunnyside Communications. Identifying a jazz musician’s place of birth has interested me ever since my parents gave me a copy of Leonard Feather’s 1962 The New Edition of The Encyclopedia of Jazz. Some thirty years later it became essential for me to know which musicians hailed from my home state of Texas, once I had taken on the task of writing about Texans in jazz history. As a result of this quest for knowledge, I discovered, among other things, that guitarist, trombonist, and 9 composer-arranger Eddie Durham was born and raised in San Marcos, home to Texas State University. Although I never worked my way systematically through the Feather encyclopedia or any subsequent volumes devoted to the identification of musicians’ places and dates of birth, I mistakenly felt confident that I had checked every musician on any album I had acquired over the years to see if he or she was a native Texan. Following the 1996 publication of Texan Jazz, my survey of Texas jazz musicians, I discovered a few Texans and their recordings that I had not been aware of previously. When the opportunity arose, I included them in other publications, such as my 2002 study The Early Swing Era, 1930 to 1941, and my essay “Texan Jazz, 1920- 1950,” included in The Roots of Texas Music. Despite my best efforts to trace the origins of the many jazz musicians I chronicled, it took years before I realized that Eddie Preston (a trumpeter who was born in Dallas in 1925 and died in Palm Coast, Florida, in 2009) was a native of the Lone Star State.
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