George Mitchell

Cornetist George “Little Mitch” Mitchell (1899-1972) was born in Louisville, Kentucky, and worked with dance, theater, and brass bands in Louisville before travelling with a minstrel show. From 1920 he resided in Chicago, where he encountered various New Orleans jazz musicians, including pianists Tony Jackson and Luis Russell, drummer Alfred “Tubby” Hall, and clarinetists Jimmie Noone and Johnny Dodds. He recorded with Lil Hardin Armstrong’s band, the New Orleans Wanderers, in 1926, and then became a mainstay of Jelly Roll Morton’s Red Hot Peppers 1926-27, recording a number of jazz masterworks with Morton and Johnny Dodds, as well as with others, in those years. In the early 1930s Mitchell was affiliated with Earl “Fatha” Hines, after which he became musically inactive.