Many jazzmen came up from or through the carnivals. There were good musicians too in the Ringling Brothers band. P.G. Lowery was the bandleader and a lot of good musicians would join his band to make the season. In the carnivals, you had some great drummers. There was Snag Jones, for example, out of Chicago. The carnival drummers were flashy but they also could play. Then a lot of men came up through the minstrel shows, like the Riverboat Minstrels, and a lot also came up through traveling rodeo shows like the One-O-One Ranch.

Men who came up through a background like that were guys like Edgar Battle, a wonderful trumpet player, and R.C. Hicks, a trumpet player who later played with Basie for a spell.