Update: Katy Hobgood Ray will sign copies of Snoozer Quinn: Freestyle Jazz Guitar Pioneer on Thursday, June 16, at 3 p.m. at the New Orleans Jazz Museum, 400 Esplanade Avenue. For more information about the book, visit here.

Edward “Snoozer” Quinn may be the ultimate musician’s musician, the term applied to musicians esteemed by their fellow players but little known by the public. In the 1920s and ’30s, Quinn performed with such famous jazzmen as Louis Armstrong, Bix Beiderbecke, Jack Teagarden, Paul Whiteman and Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey.

Quinn’s admirers included Danny Barker, the New Orleans guitarist and banjo player who worked with Armstrong, Cab Calloway and Billie Holiday. Barker cited the nearly forgotten Quinn as “the best of all time.” Benjie White, another early 20th-century New Orleans jazz musician, saxophonist, and clarinet player, called Quinn “one of the greatest guitar players I ever heard in my life. He was a whiz, that fellow.”

Quinn’s great-great niece, Kathryn Hobgood Ray, hopes that her new book will cast a light on the obscure guitar master. The book includes guitar transcriptions of Quinn’s recordings by Dan Sumner, a Monroe-based jazz guitarist and former music director at Lusher Charter School in New Orleans. 

Ray, like her great-great Uncle Snoozer, has lived in New Orleans, Bogalusa and Shreveport, Louisiana, as well as Houston and Memphis. During her formative years, she was intrigued by her family’s stories about Quinn and his remarkable abilities as a musician and entertainer.

“I thought his name was funny and unforgettable,” Ray said. “I didn’t realize the impact he had in music during his era.”

Ray began researching Quinn seriously in 2004. Her inspirations for the work included Steve Howell, the noted east Texas guitarist with whom she performed in a Shreveport jazz group during her early 20s. Howell’s awareness of and appreciation for Quinn surprised Ray. 

“Steve already knew who Snoozer Quinn was,” Ray recalled. “And then he gave me a photograph of Snoozer with Louis Armstrong. That set me off. I had to know everything about this guy.”

A 2013 graduate in musicology from Tulane University, Ray wrote her master’s thesis about Quinn. Howell later encouraged her and Sumner to expand awareness of Quinn through a book. Ray’s sources include her family and the oral histories from Quinn’s friends and contemporaries archived at Tulane’s Hogan Archive of New Orleans Music and New Orleans Jazz.

Ray first heard recordings of Quinn’s guitar artistry in 2004 via a cassette tape given to her by her Quinn family cousins in Bogalusa. Like first-time listeners of classical guitarists, she found it difficult to believe that so much music could be produced by a solo guitarist.

“I also had an emotional reaction, because I’d been hearing about Snoozer for so song,” Ray said. “I had the same reaction when I first heard Lead Belly. A chill went down my spine. It was almost foreign to me, even though it’s deeply nestled in the place I’m from. It was magically exotic and different from anything I’d ever heard.”

Born in 1907 in McComb, Mississippi, Quinn mostly grew up in Bogalusa. He was playing violin, mandolin, and guitar by age 7, and he began performing for dances, vaudeville and minstrel shows during his teens. Following graduation from Bogalusa High School in 1924, he performed with various groups, including Paul English’s traveling shows, the Louisiana Ramblers, the St. Louis Rhythm Kings, Mart Britt’s Sylvan Beach Orchestra, Claude Blanchard’s Orchestra and Peck’s Bad Boys.

In 1928, Quinn joined the famous Paul Whiteman Orchestra. He soon returned to Louisiana, however, and subsequently recorded with country singer and future Louisiana governor Jimmie Davis. Quinn traveled with Louisiana-based groups and led his own band in Bogalusa. In 1949, the 42-year-old musician died in the tuberculosis ward of New Orleans’ Charity Hospital.

Quinn’s accompanist role in recordings he made with ensembles don’t showcase his multi-voiced, fingerstyle virtuosity. Recordings of Quinn made by New Orleans jazz cornetist John Wigginton Hyman, aka Johnny Wiggs, are the only evidence of his solo genius known to exist. Wiggs made the recordings in Charity Hospital shortly before the guitarist’s death.

“We wouldn’t know if it hadn’t been for Johnny Wiggs,” Ray said. “He did us an immeasurable favor by going to the hospital that day.”

Sumner hopes that Snoozer Quinn: Fingerstyle Jazz Guitar Pioneer furthers Quinn’s recognition in jazz and jazz guitar history.

“He did lot of things that eventually made their way into the canon, but he was forgotten along the way,” Sumner said. “He shouldn’t be forgotten.”