- Aliases
-
Grandma Merrill
- Real name
- Blanche Howard Merrill Smith
- Born
- November 27, 1892
- Died
- March 1972
- Country
- United States
- IPI
-
00020568504 1 work
- Affiliation
- ASCAP
- Comments
- New York pianist and composer, who took her stage name from her first husband, Norman Watters Merrill, who died very suddenly at age 26 in 1915 leaving Blanche as a widow. She then married her second husband was Willie "The Lion" Smith. In the early 1950s she found herself semi-retired, but was asked in early 1960 to record some ragtime and old show tunes on an upright piano and a star was reborn. As she was now in her late sixties she was labeled "Grandma" Merrill.
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