Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Joe Mooney was born in Paterson, New Jersey on March 14, 1911 and went blind when he was around 10 years of age. His first job, at age 12, was playing the piano for requests called in to a local radio station. He and his brother, Dan, played together on radio broadcasts in the late 1920s, and recorded between 1929 and 1931 as the Sunshine Boys and the Melotone Boys, both sang while Joe accompanied on piano. They continued performing together on WLW in Cincinnati, Ohio until 1936, after which time Dan Mooney left the music industry.

In 1937, he began working as a pianist and arranger for Frank Dailey, a role he reprised with Buddy Rogers in 1938. Through the early 1940s, Joe arranged for Paul Whiteman, Vincent Lopez, Larry Clinton, Les Brown, and The Modernaires. Putting together his own quartet in 1943, he sang and played the accordion with accompaniment on guitar, bass, and clarinet.

In the last half of the 1940s his group experienced considerable success in the United States. By 1946, a newspaper columnist wrote that Mooney’s music “has the most cynical hot jazz critics describing it in joyous terms, such as exciting, new, the best thing since Ellington, and as new to jazz as the first Dixieland jazz band was when it first arrived”. As for Mooney himself, the columnist wrote that he “played in virtuoso fashion … a fellow who knows not only his instrument, but jazz music, both to just about the ultimate degree.”

In the 1950s, Mooney sang with the Sauter-Finegan Orchestra and played with Johnny Smith in 1953. After moving to Florida in 1954 he concentrated more on the organ and recorded in 1956. 1963 saw a group of friends form a company to produce a record, Joe Mooney and His Friends. He recorded again in the middle Sixties. Accordionist, organist, and vocalist Joe Mooney passed away after a stroke at age 64, on May 12, 1975, in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

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