The Historical Society of Avon ParkAVON PARK, FL · EST. 1886
Menu
Admin Sign-In

This is a draft. It is published so it can be read and corrected, not because it is finished.

Lloyd Correll the Musician: The Music Store, the Town Band, and the Paul Whiteman Tradition

Summary

Lloyd Benson Correll (1892–1950), remembered in Avon Park as the town’s first undertaker, was also its music dealer. He kept a music store on Main Street through the 1920s, first in a small frame building and then in the new brick block beside the bank, and stored his funeral supplies in the back of the shop.[maxwell-1976] A family tradition, recorded by his granddaughter in 2008, adds that before the Depression he played second-chair trombone in the Paul Whiteman Orchestra, the most famous dance band in America.[iagenweb-correll-2008][iagenweb-correll-2009] No contemporary record has been found that places Correll in Whiteman’s band, and the dates and places the family remembers do not sit easily beside the census record of where Correll actually was. The tradition is recorded here as a tradition, and the documented musical life he led in Avon Park is set out beside it.

What the family remembers

Evidence: tradition.

In December 2008 Jane Correll Clark, daughter of Lloyd Correll Jr., posted a query on an Iowa genealogy message board seeking information on her grandfather. She wrote that he “was a musician and played the trombone with the Paul Whiteman Orchestra.”[iagenweb-correll-2008] In a follow-up the next month she added the detail and the qualification together: “He played the trombone (I think 2nd chair) in the Paul Whiteman Band until the depression hit.” She explained that her father had been in the Air Force, that the family had never lived near relatives, and that she was “just getting started” on the research.[iagenweb-correll-2009] This is the only known statement of the claim. It is a grandchild’s recollection of a grandfather who died before she could have known him, set down nearly sixty years after his death, and it is offered with her own hedge attached.

Where Correll actually was, 1917 to 1930

The census record of the Correll household fixes the family’s movements in the years the Whiteman band was being formed and becoming famous. The children’s birthplaces, as their parents reported them to the 1930 federal census and the 1935 Florida state census, run New York (about 1917), Waterloo, Iowa (1919), Bedford, Indiana (1921), and Florida (1924).[census-correll-1930][census-fl-1935] By 1924 the family was settled in Avon Park, and in April 1930 the census taker recorded Lloyd Correll on South Forest Street as an undertaker running his own funeral home, with his wife, his widowed mother and his children in the house.[census-correll-1930]

Paul Whiteman’s orchestra grew up on the other side of the country in the same years. Whiteman led hotel bands in San Francisco, Santa Barbara and Pasadena through 1918 and 1919, opened at the Alexandria Hotel in Los Angeles just before Christmas 1919 with a nine-piece ensemble that carried a single trombonist, Buster Johnson, and only in the summer of 1920 went east to the Ambassador Hotel in Atlantic City and then to New York, where the recording of “Whispering” made the band a national name.[rayno-whispering-2019] When Whiteman was in California, Correll was in New York and Iowa; when Whiteman reached New York, Correll was in Iowa, then Indiana, then Florida. The family’s memory that he played with Whiteman “until the depression hit” cannot be reconciled with a man who was burying his neighbors in Avon Park from the early 1920s and was recorded there as an undertaker in 1930.[iagenweb-correll-2009][maxwell-1976][census-correll-1930]

There is one way the tradition could be true in substance if not in detail. From 1921 Whiteman ran a booking agency, Paul Whiteman, Inc., that signed other orchestras and sent them out under the tagline “Paul Whiteman, Inc., Presents.” By 1923 the agency was managing bands across the country, and a New Jersey newspaper reported in February 1924 that it had “more than thirty bands, each playing as a ‘Paul Whiteman Band’,” with one in nearly every large city.[sutton-whiteman-satellites-2025] A trombonist who spent a season in one of these franchised orchestras could honestly tell his family he had played in “the Paul Whiteman band,” and the story could harden over two generations into a chair in the famous orchestra itself. No record has been found naming Correll in any of them either, and the possibility is offered only as the most economical explanation of a family memory that is otherwise hard to place.

The music store on Main Street

Evidence: single-source.

Whatever he had played before he came south, in Avon Park Correll was known as a music man as much as an undertaker. The town history records that he opened a music store near the middle of the block that held the First National Bank, and that old-timers remembered the swinging doors at its entrance; he kept the funeral supplies in the rear of the store.[maxwell-1976] When the new brick building went up beside the bank, next to the Harris and McGinnis drug store that became Touchton’s, he moved the music store into it, and the swinging doors moved with him.[maxwell-1976] Before that he had handled J. M. Stephenson’s funeral business in the small wooden building next to the post office, the little house on Main Street that the town history calls its oldest surviving building, and later he moved his business to the Arcade across the street and finally to a house on South Forest Street, with the family upstairs and the funeral parlor below.[maxwell-1976]

The Town Band

Evidence: single-source.

Band concerts were the town’s favorite public entertainment before radio, and on 5 February 1923 the Town Council voted fifty dollars a month to support the Town Band, “which was made up of men of the town,” and a hundred and fifty dollars for its instructor, Charles R. Nichols.[maxwell-1976] The town history does not print the band’s roster, and Correll’s membership in it is not recorded; a trombone player who dealt in instruments and lived a block from the bandstand is the obvious candidate, but that is inference, not evidence. What the book does show is a man in the middle of the town’s public life: he appears with the 1927 Volunteer Firemen, who were also American Legion Post No. 69, and in the photograph of the St. Louis Cardinals’ girls’ baseball team of the same era he is identified as the team’s clown, beside Katherine Bristol, after whom his youngest daughter was named.[maxwell-1976]

What can be said

That Lloyd Correll was a working musician before he was an undertaker is likely: his family remembered him as one, he chose the music trade when he set up in Avon Park, and the town remembered the shop with the swinging doors. That he played trombone in the Paul Whiteman Orchestra rests on a single family recollection, hedged by the person who recorded it, and is contradicted in its timing by the census. The most that can be said with confidence is that the Correll family believes it, and that if there is anything behind it, a franchised “Paul Whiteman” band of 1922 to 1924 is a likelier setting than Whiteman’s own bandstand.

References

Where this comes from

Evidence
tradition — Local tradition, recorded but not documented.
Review
unverified — Drafted from sources but not yet checked by a volunteer.
Rights
society

Sources

  1. Jane Correll Clark, Lloyd Benson Correll, query on the IAGenWeb Unknown County message board (2008) · secondary
  2. Jane Correll Clark, Re: Lloyd Benson Correll, reply on the IAGenWeb Unknown County message board (2009) · secondary
  3. Leoma Bradshaw Maxwell, The First Hundred Years of Avon Park, Florida, pages 96, 157, 170, 172, 186, 202 and 208 (Held at the Avon Park Historical Society Depot Museum, Avon Park, Florida) (1976) · book
  4. United States Bureau of the Census, 1930 United States Federal Census, Highlands County, Florida, Enumeration District 28-1, Sheet 9A, lines 15–22 (1930) · official
  5. Florida Department of Agriculture, 1935 Florida State Census, Highlands County, Avon Park Precinct 1, line 40 (1935) · official
  6. Don Rayno, Library of Congress National Recording Preservation Board, "Whispering": Paul Whiteman and his Orchestra (1920), essay for the National Recording Registry (2019) · secondary
  7. Allan Sutton, Mainspring Press, Paul Whiteman, Inc.: A Preliminary Survey of the Whiteman Satellite Orchestras (2025) · secondary

Something here wrong, or incomplete? The Society would rather know. Tell a volunteer.

Have a question about this record?

← Back to collection

Ask A.P.

Ask the archive

    Try asking:

    0 / 500

    A.P. answers only from the Society's own archive and cites what it used. Questions are not linked to you; search history is stored on your device only (how it works).Ask a volunteer for anything it cannot answer.