On this date… 21 January 1989
Trans jazz musician Billy Tipton dies
A relatively low-key, minor celebrity who worked out of Spokane, Washington for most of his life, Billy Tipton was a jazz musician, bandleader, and talent broker. He was born in Oklahoma City on 29 December 1914, and raised by an aunt in Kansas City, Missouri after his parents divorced when he was four. He died on this date, 21 January 1989. Nothing special about that, since people die everyday. What was special and shocking for the time, and to most of his friends and family, was that Tipton was transgender, having spent most of his life living as a man.
Kansas City, a renowned jazz town, piqued Tipton’s interest in music early, and in high school he played piano and saxophone. He attempted to join the all-male school band at Southwest High School but, having been assigned female at birth, was not allowed. Instead he returned to Oklahoma for his final year of high school and joined the school band at Connors State College High School.
By 1933 Tipton was binding his breasts and living the role of a male jazz musician. He was given the name Dorothy Lucille Tipton at birth, went by “Tippy” for a while in school before adopting the name Billy Lee Tipton. Despite the availability of hormone replacement pills and gender reassignment surgeries, Tipton chose not to pursue those paths. Instead, he told each of his five wives, none of whom he legally married, that he had once been in a horrific car wreck which had left him with permanent ribcage damage and disfigured genitals. He also claimed this is what caused his “sterility,” necessitating adoption of his three children.
In his early 20s Tipton was a bandleader for a local Oklahoma City radio station and toured the Midwest throughout the 1930s and ‘40s. By 1951 Tipton had moved to the Pacific Northwest, using it as a base to tour Washington, Idaho, Oregon, and California. It was on one of these tours in Santa Barbara, California in 1956 that a talent scout from Tops Records heard Tipton and his band play, offering them a contract. The Billy Tipton Trio recorded two albums of jazz standards for Tops, both released in 1957.
These had enough middling success that the Billy Tipton Trio was offered a position as house band for a casino in Reno, Nevada, as well as opening for fellow musician Liberace. Tops even invited the trio to record four more albums, but Tipton declined it all. Instead he worked as a talent broker in Spokane and performed weekly with the trio. He eventually retired from music in the late 1970s due to arthritis.
Once the public learned about Tipton’s gender assignment from birth, there was considerable media interest. Stories about him appeared just days after his funeral, in media as diverse as tabloids like the National Enquirer to magazines and newspapers such as People and The New York Times. His story shocked many people, and has inspired plays, songs, a novel, musicians like The Tiptons Sax Quartet, and a documentary. In the end, Tipton, of whatever gender, was a man who was most at home playing and being around jazz, and for that he was very successful.