HORACE HEIDT - AUTOGRAPHED INSCRIBED PHOTOGRAPH - HFSID 291236

HORACE HEIDT
Shown in dinner jacket, with his hands clasped
Photograph inscribed and signed: "To/'Nancy'/Sincerely/Horace Heidt". B/w, 8x10. Horace Heidt (1901-1986), who had a childhood stammer and a seeming lack of interest in music, seemed an unlikely candidate for one of the most successful big band leaders of the late 1930s and early 1940s. He preferred football, but a back injury in college ended his sports ambitions. To make a living, Heidt organized his first band, Horace Heidt and the Californians, in 1923. The band got bigger, went through some name changes and finally hit it big in 1936, when they got their first radio broadcast from the Drake Hotel in Chicago, Illinois as Horace Heidt and His Musical Knights. The show, Heidt's Pot O' Gold, ran for nine years and included a popular on-air cash giveaway. Heidt's hits include Gone with the Wind (1937), Little Heaven of the Seven Seas (1937) Ti-Pi-Tin (1938), The Man with the Mandolin (1939) and The Hut-Hut Song (1941). A number of important musicians and singers got their start with Heidt's band, including singers the King Sisters, Gordon MacRae and Art Carney, composer Frank DeVol, guitarist Alvino Rey, pianist Frankie Carle and Jess Stacy and trumpeter Bobby Hackett. Heidt turned his attention from big band music as musical tastes changed and started investing in hotels and other property, making him one of the wealthiest men in the entertainment business by the 1950s. Lightly worn at edges. Otherwise, fine condition.