Raymond "Syd" Valentine

Raymond “Syd” Valentine (b. 1908, Indianapolis – d. 1988, Indianapolis) – Trumpet player and band leader. While working as an usher at Indy’s Washington Theatre in his early teen years, Valentine started cornet lessons with Frank Clay, a member of the pit band there. During his last couple years of high school, he lived in Terre Haute, where he played with Paul Stuart’s Wee-Hour Serenaders, which also included famous clarinetist Jimmy O’Bryant. During one of his summer vacations in high school, he joined Fred Wisdom’s Merrymakers in Kansas City. After graduation (around 1926), Valentine went back to Indianapolis and then toured with Jigfield Follies, a dramatic production that took him to New York City. Upon his return to Indy in 1928, he formed a 10-member band called the Patent Leather Kids, of which Charlie Fuqua of the Ink Spots was a member. While playing with his group at the Rainbow Palm Gardens on Indiana Avenue in the same year, Valentine accepted an offer to join a Milwaukee-based band led by Bernie Young. Following that experience, he resided briefly in Chicago where he sat in with various bands including Carroll Dickerson’s group, which included Louis Armstrong. Also in the late 1920s, he played briefly with a newly organized band led by Horace Henderson, Fletcher’s younger brother. With this group, Syd alternated between first and second trumpet while an eighteen-year old Roy Eldridge played third. Starting in 1929, he played lead with the Hardy Brothers’ pit band, which traveled the Eastern black vaudeville circuit. Around the same time, he played with Speed Webb’s band. During the first half of the 1930s, he played with a variety of groups, including those led by Earl Hines, Tiny Bradshaw and Elmer Calloway. Following a few years living in Brooklyn, he settled permanently in Indianapolis in the late 1930s and played locally before retiring from music in the 1960s. His most noted recordings were with a trio that cut several sides—some of them backing Hattie Snow—on Gennett Records in 1929.