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Pee Wee Hunt was born Walter Gerhardt Hunt on May 10, 1907 in Mount Healthy, Ohio. Developing a musical interest at an early age, his mother played the banjo and his father played the violin. The teenager 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. Graduating from the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music, he joined Jean Goldkette’s Orchestra in 1928.

Pee Wee 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. He returned to the West Coast music scene in 1946 and his Twelfth Street Rag became a three million-selling number one hit in 1948.

Hunt was satirized as Pee Wee Runt and his All-Flea Dixieland Band in Tex Avery’s animated MGM cartoon Dixieland Droopy in 1954. His second major hit was Oh! in 1953, his second million-selling disc, which reached number three in the Billboard chart.

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

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