END NOTES

Goodbye Ramsey Lewis

The biggest smiles on the South Side of Chicago

On this morning's swim, I was thinking about Ramsey Lewis, who died a couple days ago. I only met him once at one of his son’s CD release parties. We grew up with a couple of the Lewis boys, his sons. That’s how we referred to them — the Lewis boys.

They were tall beautiful boys with huge smiles who knew how to play instruments. Their dad was a star.

Ramsey Emmanuel Lewis Jr. was a jazz legend. He recorded five gold records and won three Grammy Awards in his career. He also recorded 80 albums. In 1965, he earned critical praise and the Grammy for Best Jazz Performance. He had a daily radio show called The Ramsey Lewis Morning Show in Chicago for which he won 2000 Radio Personality of the Year. He was the artistic director of the Ravinia Jazz Fesitval in 1992. He was a mentor for kids in music and in life. He performed in more than twenty-five symphony orchestras.

I saw him at Ravinia a few times, but only once did I sit next to him and shake his hand. Sitting next to a legend is wild, especially when he is proudly watching his son perform.

Ramsey Lewis had seven kids, but I only knew two of them. It was hard not to know them. They were the most handsome boys in town and sons of a legend — but they were also just teenagers. Just a wee bit cooler than most of us.

Ramsey launched into popularity with the album The In Crowd. The song The In Crowd possesses such swagger, you can’t hear it without swaying some part of your body.

Growing up in the time of New Order, Roxy Music, U2, Madonna, Duran Duran, blues and jazz offered us a different perspective. Ramsey was jazz incarnate.

What I liked most about the Ramsey boys was their ease. They were bigger than life but easy to talk to. When I think of the Lewis boys, my smile widens. Smiling came easy for them. Not saying they didn’t have any demons, but there was enough sizzle in their smiles to hide them.

If by some miracle you missed The In Crowd, Ramsey also became famous for his renditions of Wade in the Water and Hang on Sloopy.

On the South Side of Chicago, we had blues and jazz clubs that welcomed underage kids. As young girls going to jazz and blues clubs, we were a curiosity to the older men there. We flirted but cautiously. That was a loaded situation, and boundaries were palpable.

The Lewis’s basement was filled with instruments. I didn’t go there a lot but when I did, it was just another teenager having a party. I’d heard Ramsey wasn’t a talker so if I snuck upstairs to try to talk to him, I’d have met a man of few words. Few words but a world filled with music.

Maybe one of the things that made Ramsey Lewis great was his ability to listen and not blather on. Musicians are good at that. At least the ones I’ve met. If you want to hear the sound of the world, you gotta keep your ears open.

I bumped into one of the Ramsey boys decades after I was a teen. I was downtown and we immediately recognizes one another. That’s high school. The people you knew are frozen in time.

That’s when he invited me to his brother's CD release party. I shook Ramsey's hand that night as he proudly watched his son perform on stage. What a legacy.

When I was swimming this morning, I thought about Ramsey Lewis and his family. I thought about the legacy he was leaving with his children. Music.

When we leave the world, we ask ourselves, did I make the world any better? In Ramsey Lewis’s case, yes.

Ramsey Lewis, composer, pianist, weekly syndicated jazz show, father, grandfather, great-grandfather, husband, mentor. 87 years and none of it wasted, but what I remember is his smile that he passed on and his soundtrack that wove into our lives whether you noticed or not.

Credits: https://www.thehistorymakers.org/biography/ramsey-lewis-44

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