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Thelonious Monk: North Carolina
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The jazz pianist and composer Thelonious Monk is usually remembered as a hip New Yorker. He was a pioneer of Bebop who lived most of his life on Manhattan's West Side. But Monk was born in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, and raised by his mother, a native of that tobacco and railroad town. Monk's son and the writer Alan Gurganus, among others, reflect on Monk's often-neglected Southern roots -- and, by extension, those of many other jazz greats.
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Originally born Thelonious Jr. in North Carolina, Monk's family moved to New York City when he was four. He began piano at age 6, and soon was playing at Harlem parties and in churches. In his mid-teens he changed his middle name to his maternal grandfather's name, Sphere. Monk attended Stuyvesant High School, and ... spent two years touring with a woman evangelist.
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Photo credit: Green Street, later renamed Red Row, the Rocky Mount, North Carolina road on which Thelonious Monk's family lived, from his birth in 1917 until 1922. Photo by Jonathan Williams, 1970, Courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
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