Eddie Miller discusses starting out as a musician.

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Eddie Miller discusses his leaving New Orleans.

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Eddie Miller discusses his return to New Orleans.

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Q: “Was your family musical? You say you had an uncle who had a band. How did you start playing?”

A: Eddie Miller: “My dad, you know, he had a very good answer to my mother for music, but my dad played an old German accordion, not a piano accordion, an old German accordion. Squeezebox. The German aggravator, he used to call it. So I guess, when he was a young man, he never drank in his life, all right? He never smoked in his life, but he hung around with guys that did, you know. So they'd go around at night and serenade different girls' homes and serenade them, you know, with guitar, bass fiddle and accordion, you know. So he didn't have any eyes for the musicians. When I was young, I wanted to be one of the kids. I wanted to be an artist or a cartoonist or something and there was no art schools in Middleland or Seton Hall, you know, that amounted to anything, or clubs and stuff. But I wanted to play music mainly and he would never buy me an instrument. So there was a newspaper, the New Orleans Item, that was going to organize a newsboys band and so I went out and sold newspapers to get in the newsboys band and that's how I got to ...”

Interviewer: “Like to get an instrument.”

Eddie Miller: “Yeah, we had about six months of musical training, you know, and then we got our instruments. So naturally I wanted to play saxophone, you know, not knowing that really you should start to play clarinet. Learn clarinet first before you ever start to play saxophone because that's a requirement to play both instruments.”