Charles Gray (13)

Born in Wisconsin on September 7, 1918, Charles Gray was the son of bassist Harry W. Gray, who joined the segregated Union local in 1928 and had been its president since 1937. Walter Allen, who interviewed Gray for his book Hendersonia, commented that Gray "claims to be from Chicago but sounds Southern in speech" (p. 562). (Harry Gray was originally from Tennessee, Charles' mother Lina was from Wisconsin, and the family did not arrive in Chicago until Charles was 10.) A good Swing trumpeter, Charles had played in a very early Nat Cole band (1934, according to Allen), with Eddie Cole and Carroll Dickerson in 1935, and with Stuff Smith and John Kirby at unspecified dates.He took over the first trumpet chair in the Fletcher Henderson band at the Club DeLisa in August or September of 1946, after Elisha Hanna quit. When Fletcher departed the DeLisa on May 18, 1947, leaving most of his musicians high and dry, Gray was promptly recruited to play lead trumpet for the bulked-up Red Saunders band. He left Saunders in 1948. Gray did play trumpet on two Chicago sessions behind Big Joe Turner (for National, on November 29 and December 9, 1947). We don't know much about Charles Gray's activities in succeeding years, though he remained on the scene and was voted a lifetime membership in the Chicago Federation of Musicians on June 6, 1979 (Charles was not prominent locally, so this was obviously done on account of his father's holding a leadership role for so many years). Charles Gray got behind on his dues and was stricken from the membership rolls in 1987; he died in Las Vegas, Nevada, on March 6, 1995.