This artist, eventually known using the moniker Hutch Hutchinson, was scared into expatriate status by a Ku Klux Klan rally in Florida, only to become one of the most popular singers in England. The country-hopping saga of Leslie Hutchinson actually begins in Grenada some eight decades prior to the invasion by Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. Hutchinson's father was the local church organist, starting his son on lessons at a young age.

Hutchinson headed to New York City in his teens, originally to get a law degree. His financial situation forced him into many day jobs, but he also began playing the piano and singing in bars, coming up with a pleasant style and getting the chance to record by the mid-'20s. He began performing with the ensemble of Henry Broadway Jones, a Black band that often worked in front of audiences of white millionaires. The group became a target of the dreaded KKK, bent on burning down the band's somewhat shabby housing accommodations -- an idea that, minus all overtones of racism, has no doubt occurred to many traveling bands themselves.

Hutch's decision to skip the country is understandable. His timing was also impeccable, and not just musically: he showed up in Paris when the so-called "jazz age" was in full swing. Joe Zelli's, one of the hipper clubs, offered Hutchinson a regular gig at which he was spotted by an impresario who subsequently presented Hutchinson in a Rodgers Hart show at the London Pavilion in 1927. Hutchinson became a popular cabaret attraction in London: Cole Porter's song "Let's Do It" was one of his trademarks and he supposedly made up some 70 new verses. His records sold well throughout the late '40s and he continued performing on television and radio in the '60s. ~ Eugene Chadbourne, Rovi