Biography
Ford Leary’s moniker evoked a curt distaste for a certain make of motorcar, and his abbreviated run as a musician stretched from the middle 1930s in New York City until the final years of the following decade inside Bellevue Hospital. He remains the sole trombonist of any prominence to pass away while still a patient at that notorious facility, though anyone averse to the instrument might have preferred every player of it confined there. In 1949 he entered Bellevue after a prolonged stretch of severe physical decline; for no less than two years he had struggled to mend a back injury whose effects abruptly stalled the fresh direction his work had just begun to take. That direction had opened when he made his mark as a performer in the Broadway production Follow the Girls.
Earlier, Leary’s most useful engagement had come alongside bandleader Bunny Berigan while he hustled for pick-up jobs as a New York freelancer. Ray Charles later summed up the pace of such an existence in his memoir Brother Ray with the observation “That’s some slow sh*t.” From there the trombonist passed through the orchestras of Larry Clinton in 1938, Charlie Barnet in 1940, and Mike Riley in 1941. The next year one-armed trumpeter Muggsy Spanier recruited him for a large ensemble he had assembled.
Earlier, Leary’s most useful engagement had come alongside bandleader Bunny Berigan while he hustled for pick-up jobs as a New York freelancer. Ray Charles later summed up the pace of such an existence in his memoir Brother Ray with the observation “That’s some slow sh*t.” From there the trombonist passed through the orchestras of Larry Clinton in 1938, Charlie Barnet in 1940, and Mike Riley in 1941. The next year one-armed trumpeter Muggsy Spanier recruited him for a large ensemble he had assembled.