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1 Finding a Rhythm  Philadelphia and Wilmington, North Carolina M y parents were Carolinians but from different states. My father, Percy, was born in Wilmington, North Carolina, on March 19, 1898, and my mother, Arlethia, in Sumter, South Carolina, on June 4, 1903. They moved to Philadelphia in 1923. My grandmother on my mother’s side was Ella Wall, and her husband was Sandy. My mother and father had very little but gave us so much. They taught us respect and love, how to share, and they gave us music. My brothers, Percy and Albert, my sister, Elizabeth, and I were aware of the sacrifices they made for us. We were extremely lucky and blessed to have parents like them. They were honorable , lovable, hard-working people. The world would be a much better place if there were more folks like them. Not a day goes by when I don’t thank them for their example of how to live. I was born on October 25, 1926, in my parents’ house at 5710 Ludlow Street in Philadelphia. I was in a hurry to get here, so I couldn’t wait for my mother to get to a hospital. My first chorus began when I entered this world at home thanks to my grandma, who acted as the midwife. I had an older brother, Billy, who died of pneumonia at nine months old. My sister, Elizabeth, was born in 1921; my older brother, Percy, who later played bass in the Modern Jazz Quartet for over forty years, was born in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1923. My younger brother, Albert (“Tootie”), who took up the drums, was born in Philly in 1935. I don’t think my parents could have predicted that their three sons would all become professional musi- 4 | first chorus (1926 –1949) cians known as “The Heath Brothers.” Elizabeth had her own names for us: “Lord Percy,” “King James,” and “Prince Albert.” I guess that was her sarcastic way of “feeling a draft” because she wasn’t in the music business. As a family, we moved around Philly quite a bit. We lived in West Philly and South Philly. Philadelphia had one of the oldest black communities in the United States, dating back to just after the American Revolution, when they called it the “free black community.” I went to elementary school at the Smith School in South Philadelphia until 1939. It was a ghetto school, so everybody was black. My father and mother were on welfare during the war. My father had been an automobile mechanic, but at that time he was on welfare and worked on bridge building with the WPA. He wasn’t doing that well financially. When I left Smith School, for financial reasons, I attended high school in Wilmington, North Carolina, but I returned to Philly in the summers. Percy had gone to school down there too, and we both eventually graduated from Williston Industrial High School in Wilmington. In Wilmington, Percy and I lived at 412 McRae Street near Eighth and Redcross, a major crossroads in the city. My great-grandmother on my father ’s side, Carmella, was born during slavery, and I remember seeing my great-grandfather driving a dray on the dirt roads. Carmella’s daughter, my grandmother, Mattie, had white blood. Mattie and her second husband, Oliver Fisher, had a grocery store in Wilmington, and they were doing better than my father and mother. It was an independent business, and they sold groceries and supplies to the black schools in Wilmington. I sold newspapers and shined shoes until I was fifteen , and then I went to work at the store, clerking and delivering groceries on a bicycle. Although he ran the store, my step-grandfather couldn’t read or write. He had a mind like a computer, but the best he could do was to write down figures. If I wasn’t in the store, or my uncle or my grandmother was out, and somebody called in for an order of food, my step-grandfather would write down all the numbers and could tell you exactly which order belonged to a customer, although he couldn’t write down the name. In 1941, my father sent me a saxophone for Christmas. It was a silver Conn, an alto. Percy, Jr., had already been playing violin in junior high school, and my sister Elizabeth had had piano lessons. My father had said that I would be the next one to be given...

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