John Spikes
jazz musician
John Curry Spikes (July 22, 1881 – June 28, 1955) was an American jazz musician and entrepreneur.
Along with his brother Reb Spikes, John ran a traveling show band in early 1900s. At one point, Jelly Roll Morton was a member of the band. The Spikes brothers were performing in San Francisco around 1915, under the name The Original So-Different Orchestra, with Reb Spikes billed as the "World's Greatest Saxophonist". Around 1919, they settled in Los Angeles, where they started a music store, a nightclub, an agency and a publishing house.
They were the first to record an all-black jazz band in 1922. In 1927, they shot a short sound film that predated The Jazz Singer, the first full-length sound film. Their most enduring musical collaborations were writing the lyrics to Morton's Wolverine Blues and their own composition, Someday Sweetheart, which has become a jazz standard.
“John Spikes” enters the record as jazz musician. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what John, Spikes and jazz can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6258668. VIAF identifies the subject as 117149294368980522299. The Library of Congress control number is no2008015010. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1881, 1955, 1915 and 1919.
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This entry incorporates text from “John Spikes” 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.