Nashville was a sort of a very quiet city. There was nothing going on there. We had too many colleges and too many schools. We had a medical college and we had all kinds of colleges in there. And everybody was going to school, you know what I mean. And there would be some students who'd come from the south like Savannah, Georgia, Atlanta, come to Mahare Medical College. And every now and then maybe a guy, a violin player, he may come there to study medicine or something, but he played violin. We had a drummer, we had a violin, we had a piano player, we had a tenor saxophone player there, he was a dentist, and Herbert Blue was one of the great pianists, I've never heard anything like it in my life. And they all came to Mahare for different studies. And while they were there they got acquainted with one another and they formed a little group while they were there. And they played for like fraternity things and proms and "dancents" they used to call them on Saturday, and they did all that stuff. But they didn't raise a lot of excitement. But they were available whenever there was something that needed a group.  No one else other than Jimmy Lunceford, and he didn't care for playing for anyone but forming his band was the biggest thing he ever thought up. And his band, most of his group were in Fisk University in Nashville. And see he had a band, and I was alone, and I wasn't playing with anybody but I was studying like, I taught myself to play the instruments. And I taught myself how to play well, you know? So I was alone. I didn't play with Jimmy, I didn't play up to Mahare unless they called for me. Once in a while they'd call for me to play like a first Sunday they'll have some band to play there. And things like that. And I just worked on my own, because there wasn't anything around there anyway, wasn't no money around there to earn. I was playing in church. My mother would drive me to the church on a Sunday and I'd play a solo on the cornet. Little things.  Just old, not jazz, but old melodies, I forget what the melody was, but I played it, and I did things like that. I'm a self taught musician, up to a point. Things I needed to know I couldn't teach myself I would ask, from the best, you know, from the best I could.