Who is the oldest living recorded musician?
With the likes of Paul McCartney finishing off his Got Back Tour only a few months ago and The Rolling Stones playing dates with vim and vigour beyond their 60th anniversary, it’s easy to forget just how old the 1960s rock icons really are. With the vanishing of the original rock ‘n’ roll veterans following Jerry Lee Lewis’ death in 2022, the early Baby Boomers who scored the counterculture will pass into history sooner than you think.
There are still some artists whose recording history stretches right back to the 1950s who are still alive today, however. Jazz, broadway, and country all boast elder statespeople of the respective genres, and some are even still performing. ‘Downtown’ singer and ‘First Lady of the British invasion’ Petula Clark, 92, boasts an over 85-year career, quickly becoming a UK household name as a child star and performing ‘Mighty Lak’ a Rose’ over the radio to boost national morale during the height of the Blitz bombing campaign. Clark’s still going, appearing at the 2023 Stephen Sondheim’s Old Friends event for the BBC and singing the Follies musical number ‘I’m Still Here’.
Only announcing his retirement in 2014, jazz leader and tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins, 94, counts over 60 albums across his lengthy career, generously donating his personal archive to New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture as a resource to budding artists and musicologists. From New York to Chicago, jazz bass legend Johnny Pate, 101, began his work in the 1940s playing with Stuff Smith and Coleridge Davis and went on to produce heavyweights such as Curtis Mayfield and BB King.
Possessed with a god-given permanence and a perennially full tank of energy at 99, actor and entertainer Dick Van Dyke cut his presenting teeth as a radio personality for the US Special Services during the Second World War, entering Broadway and Hollywood by the early 1960s with the live-action animation Disney feature Mary Poppins and the popular CBS The Dick Van Dyke Show sitcom, and a litany of musical albums behind him.
Long before his braided hair and bandana, outlaw Texan country stalwart Willie Nelson, 91, was sporting slicked black hair and smart suits throughout his fledgling studio sessions across the 1950s, finally releasing his debut LP …And Then I Wrote in 1962, recorded in country capital Nashville. Nelson shows no sign of stopping, dropping his 76th solo album, Last Leaf on the Tree, last year to a positive reception.
So, who is the oldest living recorded musician?
The last surviving member of the big swing dance band the Glenn Miller Orchestra, trumpeter Ray Anthony passed his 103rd birthday last month and into the title of oldest living recorded musician.
Playing with Glenn Miller’s big band before America entered into the War in 1941, Anthony formed his own long-running band following his service with the US Navy, responsible for huge hits of the era, including The Bunny Hop and Hokey Pokey. He was so esteemed in his day that even fellow big bandleader Sy Oliver name-checked him on 1946’s ‘Opus One’: “If Mr. Les Brown can make it renowned/And Ray Anthony could rock it for me!”
