By Kim Andrew Elliott, International Broadcasting Bureau Research Analyst

If you go to my website about international broadcasting (kimandrewelliott.com) and search on “jazz,” you’ll see several entries about musicians who were inspired by Willis Conover’s jazz broadcasts on the Voice of America. They listened in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, as expected, but also in India, Cuba, Sweden – all over the world, actually.

My own first memories of Willis Conover were as a teenaged shortwave listener in Indiana. When I began working at VOA in 1985, I considered it a perk to encounter the famous international broadcaster in the corridors. Willis always had a smile and a hello for me. I don’t think he ever knew my name.

Given all the people who knew Willis, or at least listened to him on the radio, it’s surprising that the first biography about him was written by someone who had never heard of him until after Willis’s death in 1994. Nevertheless, Terence M. Ripmaster, a retired history professor, is an expert on jazz and its history, so he writes with authority and recognizes the significance of Willis’s career.

Ripmaster goes back to the early days of Willis’s life. At age 16, he started a publication for devotees of science fiction. By World War II, his interests had shifted to music. During and after the war, he was able to get work as host of jazz programs at radios stations in and around Washington. This is in the days before radio was focused-grouped and formatted, and when jazz was almost mainstream.

That must have been quite a time, those hipster days of the 1940s and 50s, when Willis frequented the jazz clubs of Washington and New York. Cigarettes were more fashionable back then, and smoke-filled clubs even more so. I regret being a bit too young to have experienced that scene, though my lungs are probably the better for it.

As Ripmaster writes, for unknown reasons, Willis largely quit the club scene when he was hired by the Voice of America, his first program airing in January 1955. Willis always worked for VOA as a contractor rather than in the civil service. This, he said, was to protect his “independence,” though it may also have provided him with more generous remuneration than received by the usual starting VOA broadcaster. Willis did not receive benefits, such as health insurance, which would have helped him as his health failed in the 1990s.

Ripmaster describes Willis’s many overseas trips, his efforts to break the color line in the jazz scene, and his personal life. We readers of biography always love gossipy, personal stuff … you do … don’t you? … and so we learn about Willis’s five marriages, which produced a grand total of zero children. But here, the author’s research trips up somewhat. On page 11, he writes that Willis married his first wife, Mary Felker, in 1952. On page 19, we read that his marriage to Felker was in 1947, ending in divorce in 1950.

Well, biography is difficult, especially when it involves gathering information from the National Archives, from the Willis Conover collection at the University of North Texas (did Willis ever set foot in Texas?), from Willis’s friends and associates, and from VOA itself. Ripmaster’s book meanders, like a procession of 4 x 6 index cards, so you have my permission not to read it from front to back, but to choose chapters as your mood suits.

When I interviewed him for VOA’s Talk to America (on 28 June 2007 ), Ripmaster told me there is enough material about Willis at the University of North Texas for at least two more books. In the meantime, there is plenty of good reading in his book for anyone interested in Willis’s life, VOA’s past, or the history of American jazz.