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Pee Wee Hunt was born Walter Gerhardt Hunt on May 10, 1907 in Mount Healthy, Ohio. He developed a musical interest at an early age, as his mother played the banjo and his father played violin. As a teenager he was a banjoist with a local band while he was attending college at Ohio State University where he majored in electrical engineering. During his college years he switched from banjo to trombone, and graduated from the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music. He joined Jean Goldkette’s Orchestra in 1928.

Hunt was the co-founder and featured trombonist with the Casa Loma Orchestra, but he left the group in 1943 to work as a Hollywood radio disc jockey before joining the Merchant Marine near the end of World War II. Returning to the West Coast music scene in 1946, his Twelfth Street Rag was a three million-selling, number one hit in 1948. His second million-selling disc was Oh! in 1953. He was satirized as Pee Wee Runt and his All-Flea Dixieland Band in Tex Avery’s animated MGM cartoon Dixieland Droopy in 1954.

Trombonist, vocalist and bandleader Pee Wee Hunt passed away on June 22, 1979 at age 72 after a long illness in Plymouth, Massachusetts

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