Terry Teachout, R.I.P.

[mjzee]

The Journal reports that Terry Teachout has passed.  I'll miss his arts reviews and analysis, both in the Journal and in Commentary.

[Ken Dryden]

I'll never forget his recommendation of the off-Broadway musical "The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee." We caught a matinee of it and we ended up with inexpensive front row tickets that we bought the day of the show. It was a scream and definitely not politically correct, full of stereotypes that were caricatured to the max.

[mjzee]

He had an interesting background, per his obituary in the Journal:

Terry Teachout, a prolific New York-based biographer and essayist who wrote exuberantly about drama for The Wall Street Journal, died early Thursday at a friend’s home in Smithtown, N.Y. He was 65 years old.

His companion, Cheril Mulligan, said a cause of death hadn’t yet been determined.

Mr. Teachout had written drama reviews for the Journal regularly since 2003. “He could never be pigeonholed,” said Eric Gibson, editor of the Journal’s Arts in Review pages. “Terry was never predictable.”

He was known for his biographies of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, George Balanchine and H.L. Mencken. He also wrote plays and librettos.

Born Feb. 6, 1956, he grew up in Sikeston, Mo. His father was a hardware salesman, and his mother was a receptionist and secretary. Mr. Teachout evoked his childhood in a 1991 memoir, “City Limits: Memories of a Small-Town Boy.”

Sikeston, he wrote, was “still a place where people salute the flag and don’t ask for receipts, where everybody knows who your parents were and what they did for a living. It is narrow and kind and decent and good, and I am blessed to have been raised in its shabby, forgiving bosom.”

As a teenager, he had the role of the fiddler in a local production of “Fiddler on the Roof” and played in a country band called Sour Mash.

In 1979, he graduated from William Jewell College in Liberty, Mo., where he studied journalism and music. He then worked as a bank teller in Kansas City, Mo., and wrote reviews for the Kansas City Star while finding gigs as a jazz bassist and striving to establish himself as a writer. Unsatisfied with his progress there, he moved to New York in the 1980s.

He obtained an editing internship at Harper’s magazine and later wrote editorials for the New York Daily News. He also worked as a contributor of essays and criticism for a variety of publications, including the National Review, while establishing himself as a biographer.

His wife, Hilary Dyson Teachout, died in 2020 after a double-lung transplant. He is survived by a brother, David Teachout.

In an October blog post, he announced that he had fallen in love with Ms. Mulligan and described her as “a theater-and-film buff.”

On Twitter, he described himself as a “critic, biographer, playwright, director, unabashed Steely Dan fan, ardent philosemite.”

Though he led a sophisticated life of culture in New York, Mr. Teachout retained some of his small-town earnestness. “I still wear plaid shirts and think in Central Standard Time,” he wrote in his memoir. “I still eat tuna casserole with potato chips on top and worry about whether the farmers back home will get enough rain this year.”

[Guy Berger]

Sad for his family and friends' loss.

I always liked the passion and enthusiasm of his writing, but had mixed feelings about the substance/content.

[John L]

RIP.   The Louis Armstrong biography was very good.  

[Chuck Nessa]

He seemed like a gleeful "wart hunter" to me.

[danasgoodstuff]

54 minutes ago, Chuck Nessa said:

He seemed like a gleeful "wart hunter" to me.

Can't say I'm familiar with that term, and Googling didn't help.

[Dan Gould]

I didn't think to google and simply took the two words in turn:

Wart (fault) hunter (seeker).

I don't think I read any of his books but I would gather Chuck means he concentrated too much on faults of his subjects, or something similar.

[Chuck Nessa]

21 minutes ago, Dan Gould said:

I didn't think to google and simply took the two words in turn:

Wart (fault) hunter (seeker).

I don't think I read any of his books but I would gather Chuck means he concentrated too much on faults of his subjects, or something similar.

Exactly.

[Larry Kart]

His Armstrong biography IIRC was decent. His Ellington biography was an eccentric wart-hunting disgrace IMO. Ellington, per Teachout, should have had academic classical training.

[gmonahan]

2 minutes ago, Larry Kart said:

His Armstrong biography IIRC was decent. His Ellington biography was an eccentric wart-hunting disgrace IMO. Ellington, per Teachout, should have had academic classical training.

I agree. If anything, Ellington's piano style was one of his more original contributions. Monk certainly paid attention to him. The Armstrong bio was good. RIP.

 

 

gregmo

[HutchFan]

3 minutes ago, Larry Kart said:

His Armstrong biography IIRC was decent. His Ellington biography was an eccentric wart-hunting disgrace IMO. Ellington, per Teachout, should have had academic classical training.

I agree completely.  The EKE bio was a huge disappointment -- very frustrating and unfair. 

 

[mr jazz]

Jazzwax had a nice tribute. They were good friends.