Summary: clickhere Visit the Radio America Store web site.Buy your 50 mp3 for &5.00 Affordable Web Hosting $5.99 A month 24 hour radio streaming James Francis Durante, better known as Jimmy Durante, (February 10, 1893 – January 29, 1980) was an American singer, pianist, comedian and actor, whose distinctive gravel delivery, comic language butchery, jazz-influenced songs, and large nose — his frequent jokes about it included a frequent self-reference that became his nickname: "Schnozzola" — helped make him one of America's most familiar and popular personalities of the 1920s through the 1970s. A product of working-class New York, Durante dropped out of school in the eighth grade to become a full-time ragtime pianist, working the city circuit and earning the nickname "Ragtime Jimmy," before he joined one of the first recognizable jazz bands in New York, the Original New Orleans Jazz Band. Durante was the only member of the group who didn't hail from New Orleans. His routines of breaking into a song to use a joke, with band or orchestra chord punctuation after each line became a Durante trademark. In 1920, the group was renamed Jimmy Durante's Jazz Band. Durante became a vaudeville star and radio attraction by the mid-1920s, with a music and comedy trio called Clayton, Jackson and Durante. By 1934, he had a major record hit, his own novelty composition "Inka Dinka Doo," and it became his signature song for practically the rest of his life. A year later, Durante starred in the Billy Rose stage musical, Jumbo, in which a police officer stopped him while leading a live elephant and asked him, "What are you doing with that elephant?" Durante's reply, "What elephant?", was a regular show-stopper.
