Library - In Memoriam
Remembering oral history interviewees who have passed away.
Ruth Sibley Bensinger wrote a song called “So Long Sweetheart” when she was a teenager. The song was about lovers split by war. Members of her musically inclined family thought the song was quite promising. Ruth decided to walk the song over to Fred Waring’s home, whom she had
Ken Ingram served as Vice President of Sales and Marketing for the Selmer Company in Elkhart, Indiana. He enjoyed working with the dealers around the country and the staff at Selmer, which he felt were the best in the business.
Don Banks was a band director who felt he could have more of an impact on music makers by providing them with quality instruments. In 1967 he opened Don Banks Music in Tampa, Florida to serve the local school bands.
Craig Schertz worked for Byerly Music in Peoria, Illinois and saw an opportunity to purchased two of the company’s ten locations when his boss and the current owner, Loren Zimmerman, was ready to retire. The stores continued to grow throughout the 1970s and 80s and when Craig de
Dave Pike made an indelible mark on jazz vibraphones! As a percussive based player, Dave wanted to play with both rhythm and pitch and to explore melodies within Bebop riffs.
Richard Ellis was proud of the three main areas of his professional career; playing, teaching and selling musical instruments. As a teenager Richard traveled with a big band, playing dances during the Swing Era.
DeWitt Scott knew about as much as a person can know about steel guitars! As a retailer he sold them, as a performer he played them, as a composer and author he wrote about them and as a fan he promoted them everyplace he went.
Ben Cauley can be heard on hundreds of Stax Record hits including those with Otis Redding. Ben was a member of Otis's backup band called the Bar-Kays, which originated as the horn section at the Stax studio in Memphis beginning in the 1960s.
Lothar Seifert came from a family of musical instrument makers in the Kirchberg area of Germany. His father, Oskar, began making bows in 1924 and by 1932 has set up a work shop in Graslitz. Like so many refugees, the Seifert family was forced to re-locate after World War II.
Yoshinori Kimbara was a former Yamaha Japan Corporation executive who worked under Genichi Kawakami beginning in the 1950s. He was the first general manager of the Yamaha Music Foundation, which was created to strengthen music education in Japan. Kimbara-San was associated with