Bix Beiderbecke Museum & Archives

10/06/2026

Bix Blast October 2026 Edition | Museum Scrapbook and Bix Letters Digitization Project, QC Museum Month Begins, New Bix Fest Reel Tapes Acquired, Memorial Contributions, QC Archives Fair, New Monthly Jazz Event, and More!

Learn More: https://mailchi.mp/bixmuseum.org/october-2026

10/03/2026

Just outside our doors is a bronze sculpture called "The Gossips" by artist Tom Lytle installed by the RDA in the early 2000s. We'd like to think they are gossiping about how great the new Bix Museum is! What do you think they are talking about?

10/02/2026

The Bix Museum came across an interesting find. We have acquired four film reels that are believed to be home recordings of Bill Donahoe's Bix Beiderbecke Memorial Jazz Band playing in Davenport in 1971 and 1973. The seller had found them in a box of reels they won at an auction earlier this year. The current origin of the recordings is unknown but we hope to learn a few things if we can get them digitized. Based on a small preview of one of the reels, it looks like different footage than what we have seen previously of the "first" Bix Fest.

09/26/2026

Since someone guessed the boy in the photo correcly, we'll reveal the owner of the scrapbook from our post yesterday. It's Howdy Quicksell, banjo player for the Jean Goldkette Orchestra!

Here are two more photos from the scrapbook featuring Howdy on the porch of his college fraternity in 1919 and Howdy with his band mates Keehn, Russ, and H. Kennedy of the Clear Lake Orchestra in 1921. Better scans are being made of the photos since these were taken by phone. The scrapbook itself features photos Howdy took with a camera he received as a child of himself, family, and friends throughout childhood until his musician days through the 1930s. It covers roughly 20 years of Howdy's life. Many of the photos are unidentified and we are working on identifying certain photos that may be available for circulation in the future. We feel some of the collection deserves to stay private so its availability is limited as we identify and make digital copies available.

The scrapbook was acquired at an auction many years ago and donated to the museum's archives by board member Randy Sandke. A big part of this scrapbook covering the Goldkette years features who we think is Don Murray in many of the photos that we are working to identify. If true, we may have one of the largest collections of original photos of Don Murray to exist, which is exciting. Two of the last known telegrams Don sent to anyone before his death and Bix's signed business card come from this collection as well. There are a few more unpublished surprises that we want to keep secret for now but plan on revealing in the future as we have plans to add more of these photos to our exhibits and online content. Keen visitors to the museum have gotten the chance to see several already.

Congrats to Debbie White and Alex Mendham for guessing correctly!

09/25/2026

The Bix Museum owns a few scrapbooks in our archives. Some of which contain many photos never publicized or rarely shared. They are on a list of restricted items not to be made available to the public due to this. We are currently going through them for a project to get some scans done for some of the photos and to do a bit of research on identifying some of the people in the photos. Here's a childhood photo of the owner of the scrapbook. Wanna guess who it might be? Hint: he's a musician that played with Bix in a major group he's known for.

09/22/2026

Another fun little post today. Spent the day yesterday going through the archives, and I came across a note from the Beiderbecke Family Collection that transcribes entries from Charles Hilton Beiderbecke's baby book (Burnie's first son) with regards to Uncle Bickie. 3 month old Charles got to listen to Bix play with the Paul Whiteman Orchestra in Clinton, Iowa on Nov 23rd, 1928. Reports from those in attendance indicate that Bix had a small contingent from Davenport who made the trip to see him play which included all of his family members and some friends. During the performance, Bix famously pulled a prank on one of his fellow trumpet chairs by removing their tuning slide during the intermission as the next song featured their solo. When it came time for the solo, the horn didn't play anything. This multiple month tour, which ended quite unceremoniously for Bix in Cincinnati, was full of pranks the members were pulling on each other and many long weeks of daily performances that left the orchestra disheveled by the end.

During Christmas of 1929 Bix decorated the family Christmas Tree and gifted his nephew bathtub toys, cotton "snowballs", and a kiddie kar. Based on a few stories we have from the Beiderbecke Family, Bix was very fond of his nephews and while back home in Davenport would play piano for Mary Beiderbecke (Burnie's wife) while she was going through the pregnancy of her second son.

We are finishing up the digitization of Bix's letters and are now going through some of our photo collections that come from multiple different musicians who played with Bix. Lots of fun stuff in the photos we might share in the future.

09/19/2026

While going through the archives during our project to digitize our collection of Bix letters, we came across a piece of art that the Beiderbecke Family saved. The museum has an interesting collection of art; we may do an exhibit on it in the future. We are pretty sure this has never been released to the public before now. This note was addressed to Bix's family home in Davenport; it included a caricature of Bix done by a man named Harold Trombla. It is dated from 1929, during a time when Bix would have been in California with the Whiteman Orchestra. Upon researching who Harold might be, we found a possible match from an archive in Nebraska:

Born at Downs, Kansas, in 1905, Charles Harold Tombla grew up in Lincoln, Nebraska, and graduated from Jackson High School. Harold left Lincoln in the late 1920s to play the cornet on the vaudeville circuit and in jazz bands with various well-known musicians, including Joe Venuti, Jack Teagarden, Billy Rose, Paul Whitman and others. Trombla married Geraldine Bailey in Oklahoma in 1931. Trombla eventually returned to Lincoln to work in real estate and printing. He worked as a printer for Standard Reliance Insurance Company and the State of Nebraska. Harold Trombla retired in 1970 and died on January 30, 1983. He is buried in Lincoln Memorial Park.

It is one of the more unique drawings of Bix to exist. The drawing and note are owned by the Bix Beiderbecke Museum and housed in our archives at the Davenport Public Library. It comes from our Beiderbecke Family Collection.

09/05/2026

The Bix Museum has been open at our new location for two months, and we are asking for your feedback! If you have visited our new space since opening, please consider leaving a review of your experience. Reviews help us with discoverability, give prospective visitors an idea of what to expect, and help us improve the experience for future guests. The link below goes to our Google Review page, but you can instead leave your feedback directly on our page, on TripAdvisor, or on Yelp if you prefer. Thank you for taking the time to give us your honest feedback.

Post a review to our profile on Google

09/04/2026

The museum is working on a project going through our collection of letters Bix wrote to his family during his life. The collection consists of just under 40 total examples of Bix's handwriting largely from his childhood and time spent at Lake Forest Academy. Many people don't know about our archives which is housed at the Richardson Sloane Special Collections Center in the Davenport Public Library and our goal is to bring better awareness to this resource that is open to the public for research. It is the largest collected primary source of information on Bix's life.

Here is a snippet of one of Bix's letters to his parents while at Lake Forest Academy a few weeks before Christmas Break. A large amount of his correspondence during the semester at Lake Forest records his struggles in class, the scores of the school's sports teams during the season he tried out for (he tried out for Basketball, Football, Tennis, and Baseball), asking for items to be mailed to him like jazz records and food, and his attempts at playing professional gigs in the area. Here, Bix is making a case for why his parents should give him a permission slip to leave campus for a gig so he can fill his pockets with dough and afford a trip back home for the holidays. While most of the responses to Bix's letters are unknown, it's clear his family was in almost weekly contact with him through letters while he was enrolled there.

08/22/2026

Here's a quick walkthrough of the new Bix Museum Space!