BUTCH THOMPSON - YOU WILL BE MISSED!
Nov 28, 1943 - August 14, 2022
The most elegant gentleman to come out of Minnesota, Mr. Butch Thompson, died yesterday in St. Paul. He picked up the New Orleans spirit listening to Jelly Roll Morton 78s and carried it through the 20th into the 21st century. He was a pianist and a clarinetist, the piano for the bounce, the clarinet for the blues, and if he could've he would've played both at the same time. We worked together for years, a quiet man, and I never knew him except through his music. God bless the memory, God preserve the music. GK
Born and raised in Marine-on-St. Croix, a small Minnesota river town, Butch Thompson was playing Christmas carols on his mother’s upright piano by age three, and began formal lessons at six. He picked up the clarinet in high school and led his first jazz group, “Shirt Thompson and His Sleeves,” as a senior.
After high school, he joined the Hall Brothers New Orleans Jazz Band of Minneapolis, and at 18 made his first visit to New Orleans, where he became one of the few non-New Orleanians to perform at Preservation Hall during the 1960s and ’70s.
In 1974, he joined the staff as the house pianist of public radio’s A Prairie Home Companion. By 1980, the show was nationally syndicated, and the Butch Thompson Trio was the house band, a position the group held for the next six years.
From the early days on APHC, Butch remembers, “It was pretty casual back then. Margaret or somebody would call me and ask if I was busy on Saturday. More than once I remember saying I couldn’t get there by showtime, and being told to show up as soon as I could. Sometimes I’d go onstage without remembering what key something was in. If Garrison was going to sing, I usually couldn’t go wrong with E major.”
By the late ’90s, Thompson was known as a leading authority on early jazz. He served as a development consultant on the 1992 Broadway hit Jelly’s Last Jam, which starred Gregory Hines. He also joined the touring company of the off-Broadway hit Jelly Roll! The Music and the Man, playing several runs with that show in New York and other cities through 1997.
The Village Voice described Butch’s music as “beguiling piano Americana from an interpreter who knows that Bix was more than an impressionist and Fats was more than a buffoon.”
Listen to an INTERVIEW WITH BUTCH during the 40th ANNIVERSARY OF PRAIRIE HOME in July of 2014.
Sad news that we have lost such an important musician and entertainer. For most of us his name was synonymous with Saturday night and A Prairie Home Companion. He was an important part of why we miss your show. Heaven has gained another talented musician.
Butch Thompson was the reason I stopped fiddling with the tuner on my radio back in 1980 as I sat at my drawing table in my studio apartment in Philadelphia, searching for good music. His ragtime piano was captivating, and it was followed by the smooth baritone voice of Mr.Keillor who launched into an insane ad for something that got me laughing in disbelief— and that’s how I discovered A Prairie Home Companion. (And the show became wonderful therapy for me, as a recent divorcée and the proud mother of a precocious two-year-old.) Decades later, I got to see Butch Thompson perform at the Scott Joplin Ragtime Festival in Sedalia, Missouri. (And because I was being squired around by another ragtime pianist, we sat down to lunch together with Butch Thompson and his wife.) My God, what a gifted artist and musician! Thank heaven I have some good CDs of Butch Thompson, and I’m going to play one now.