Herman Chittison
American musician (1908–1967)
Herman "Ivory" Chittison (October 15, 1908 – March 8, 1967) was an American jazz pianist.
Biography
Born in Flemingsburg, Kentucky, he began his career in 1928 as a member of Zack Whyte's territory band in Ohio. Chittison moved to New York in the early 1930s and found work as an accompanist to Ethel Waters, Adelaide Hall, and Clarence Williams. He also visited Boston for the first time with a traveling show headlined by comic actor Stepin Fetchit. In late 1933, he toured Europe with the Willie Lewis Orchestra; the following year, he recorded with Louis Armstrong in Paris. He and trumpeter Bill Coleman led the Harlem Rhythm Makers. Chittison and Coleman left Lewis' group in 1938 and formed a band that worked extensively in Cairo, Egypt, and traveled as far east as India. After the Italian invasion of Egypt in 1940, Chittison's escape was facilitated by Stepin Fetchit, to whom he was then indebted; the documentary filmmaker and jazz aficionado Jean Bach, who was invited backstage by Fetchit after one of his performances at the Cotton Club, recounted: "[Fetchit] had this fabulous jazz pianist, Herman Chittison, playing in his dressing room between shows ... Step helped Chittison get back to America, in return of which he became a slave of Step's ... About that time, there was a radio program called, 'Flashgun Casey, Crime Photographer' ...
“Herman Chittison” enters the record as american musician (1908–1967). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Herman, Chittison and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Herman Chittison” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Herman, Chittison and American provides the most credible route into that argument.
The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 8, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1610246. VIAF identifies the subject as 29717557. The Library of Congress control number is n93016923. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1908, 1967, 1928 and 1933.
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This entry incorporates text from “Herman Chittison” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.