"The secret is keeping busy, and loving what you do."

Lionel Hampton has had a longer musical career than most people have had lives. He has no birth certificate, so we have to take his word for it when he says he was born in 1908 in Louisville, Kentucky. Hampton's father, Charles, was a pianist and singer who went missing in action during World War I. His mother, Gertrude, moved the rest of the family to Alabama, then settled in Chicago in 1916.

Hampton's music studies began on the drums, with an unlikely teacher. "You know who taught me to play the drums? It was a nun. She was strict! I wanted to play the skins left-handed, and she'd take the sticks and beat my knuckles. Man, she was a hard nun!"

He got a job selling papers so he could join the Chicago Defender's Newsboys band. They started him off on the bass drum, and later moved him up to snare. Upon completing high school in 1929, Hampton landed a spot in the house band at the Cotton Club through a connection with Les Hite.

In 1930, after playing a show with Louis Armstrong, Hampton was asked to join the band for a recording session. There was a vibraphone in the corner. "Louie asked me, could I play some on them? And I said, 'Yeah', so I played a song called 'Chinese Chopped Suey' for Louie on the vibes, and Louie said, 'That sounds good, wait and play it on this record with us.' The record was a tune that Eubie Blake had written and sent Louie the music, a song called 'Memories of You.' Louie said, 'You go ahead and find yourself a place in there and play with us.' So I did, and that was the first time jazz was ever played on vibes."

Hampton made history in 1936 when Benny Goodman asked him to join a band that included Teddy Wilson and Gene Krupa. The Benny Goodman Quartet was the first interracial band to play nationally.

When he left Goodman, Hampton started his own band. His group helped launch many careers, including those of Dinah Washington, Illinois Jacquet, Aretha Franklin, Joe Williams, and Betty Carter. The band performed all over Europe, and later in Israel. "Jazz speaks an international language. No matter where we went, our music was accepted."

Though he is most famous for playing the vibraphone, Hampton also played drums and piano. He played piano in what he called "trigger-finger" style, pounding the keys with two fingers as if they were mallets.

And boy, did presidents love this guy. Eisenhower made him a goodwill ambassador, Bush (Sr.) put him on the board of the Kennedy Center, and Clinton gave him the National Medal of the Arts. In all, he gave performances for seven different presidents, and had one performance with a president when Bill Clinton joined in on the saxophone at Hampton's ninetieth birthday party.

On the community side, Hampton has been very involved in making music education more available to children. He also started the Lionel Hampton Development Corporation, which built low income housing in inner cities. 1987 saw the dedication of the Lionel Hampton School of Music in Idaho; the first university music school to be named after a jazz musician. Hampton called it one of the proudest moments of his career.

Hampton suffered two strokes in 1995, and died of heart failure in 2002 at the age of ninety-four.