A Tribute to Royal Stokes

My only contacts with Dr. W. Royal Stokes, who passed away last month at the age of 90, were an occasional exchange of emails, but I had long felt a kinship with the eminent jazz writer-historian. We both acquired a love of jazz at an early age, and neither of us had any formal music training. We both became serious jazz writers in our 40s, and I’m presumption enough to say we both shared a similar approach to writing. Our “instrument” was the typewriter and in recent years, the computer. Born in 1930, Dr. Stokes became an avid jazz fan in the 1940s as a young teenager. By the time he was 16, he had stockpiled a collection of some 500 78-rpm records, leading his brother to suggest that he pursue a career as a jazz historian. It wasn’t until 1969 that he decided to make good on his brother’s suggestion. Before that, he received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Washington, and a doctorate in classical antiquity from Yale University. He taught Latin and Greek language, literature, and history at five universities across the United States and Canada before plugging into the hippie lifestyle in the late 1960s—a lifestyle that ultimately brought him back to D.C. and to writing about the music he’d loved growing up. He began his career in jazz, first as a disc jockey for Georgetown University radio station WGTB with a show he called, I Thought I