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Bet you didn’t know. A jazz pianist who couldn't read a note of music wrote the rule book that protects every recording artist alive.
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A jazz pianist who couldn't read a note of music wrote the rule book that protects every recording artist alive. Erroll Garner sued Columbia Records in 1960, posted a forty thousand dollar cash bond his friends helped him raise, and won a landmark ruling in the New York State Supreme Court.

The settlement was $265,297.55. Every artist with the right to approve their own album release is standing on his back.

In the photograph from the studio, you cannot see the phone book at first. You see the cuffed white shirt, the cardigan, the wires running across the floor like vines, the way his face leans into something only he can hear.

Then your eye drops to the bench. Tucked underneath him, between his weight and the leather, is a thick Manhattan directory, the corners frayed soft from years of touring.

Erroll Garner was five feet two inches tall. He had been sitting on phone books to reach a piano since he was a boy in Pittsburgh, and he would carry one onto airplanes the rest of his life, clutching it under his arm the way other people carried briefcases.

The book itself sits in the University of Pittsburgh archive now, tattered at the corners. Beside it are seven thousand photographs and eight thousand reel-to-reel tapes, the trail Erroll left behind.

He was born in Pittsburgh on June 15, 1921, the youngest of six children, twin to a brother named Ernest. He started playing the piano at three years old, perched on whatever the household could find to raise him up to the keys.

His older siblings took lessons from a teacher named Miss Bowman. Erroll would sit nearby, listening, and then he would slide onto the bench and play back what Miss Bowman had just demonstrated, note for note.

His eldest sister Martha said he played "just like Miss Bowman." The family took it in stride, the way you take in the weather, and already knew what they had.

By seven, he was on KDKA in Pittsburgh with a group called the Candy Kids. By eleven, he was working the riverboats up and down the Allegheny, a child in a suit holding down rhythm for grown men.

He never learned to read music. Not in elementary school, not in high school, not when he played with Charlie Parker on the "Cool Blues" session in 1947, not when he won DownBeat polls year after year.

Decades later on the Tonight Show, Johnny Carson would ask him about it on national television. Erroll smiled the way he always did and answered, "No one can hear you read."

Carson laughed because Carson loved him. Erroll was his favorite jazz pianist, and Erroll knew the joke ran deeper than the laugh.

He moved to New York in 1944. The Pittsburgh musicians' union back home had refused to admit him because he could not read a score, and they would not relent and grant him honorary membership until 1956, by which time he was already the most popular jazz pianist in the world.

The union had a rulebook. Erroll had ears.

He would hear a piece of music once and own it. After attending a concert by the Russian classical virtuoso Emil Gilels in New York, he went back to his apartment and played long stretches of the program from memory, the way another person might recite a poem they had loved since childhood.

That was the part the white press could not figure out how to write about. They kept trying, and they kept getting it wrong.

In 1958, the Saturday Evening Post published a profile of him. The writer wanted readers to see a happy primitive, a naive savant who had no idea what to do with money or sophistication.

The article reported that when Erroll had been asked about Bach, he had thought Bach was some kind of beer. The magazine printed it like it was a punchline.

The Black press read that and saw what it was. The UCLA historian Robin Kelley would later put it plainly, saying the mainstream press wanted a man too simple to know what he had, while the Black press, which had been covering Erroll with respect for two decades, knew him as articulate, sober, and dangerous to the people who wanted to keep him small.

He had already given the world the ballad that would outlive every magazine on the newsstand. He had composed it on a propeller plane in 1954, somewhere between Denver and Chicago, with his eyes closed.

There were no jets that year, and the flight from San Francisco had to stop in Denver to refuel. The plane came down through a thunderstorm into Chicago, and through his window Erroll saw something he would never forget.

He told the drummer Art Taylor about it years later, in Paris. "When we were coming down there was a beautiful rainbow," he said, "fascinating because it wasn't long but very wide and in every color you can imagine."

The window was wet with fine rain. He told Taylor: "With the dew drops and the windows being misty, that fine rain, that's how I named it 'Misty.'"

His next line is the one nobody quotes. "I was playing on my knees like I had a piano, with my eyes shut."

The passenger next to him watched a small Black man humming and pressing his fingers down on his own thighs with his eyes shut tight. The passenger summoned a flight attendant, thinking the man was ill.

Erroll was composing the song that Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan and Aretha Franklin and Johnny Mathis would all record. He kept the entire piece in his memory until the plane landed and he could get to a piano and play it for someone who could write it down.

That was 1954. Four years later, a national magazine would tell America that this man was too simple to know who Bach was.

The article was on newsstands when his label, Columbia Records, started releasing his old studio recordings without telling him. Columbia had bought the goose, and the label was going to keep cooking eggs whether the goose wanted to lay them or not.

There was one problem with that plan. Erroll's manager, Martha Glaser, who had taken him on as her only client in 1950, had grown up in the labor wars of the 1930s in Pittsburgh and Detroit, where the rules of engagement were tough.

She had negotiated a clause into his 1956 Columbia contract that nobody at the label had bothered to take seriously. Erroll had the right to approve the release of his own music, every record, before it ever left the warehouse.

No artist contract had ever contained that clause before. Nobody on either side of a recording table had thought to put it there.

In 1960, Erroll Garner sued Columbia Records for breach of contract. Columbia hit back with a countersuit in federal court, which meant Erroll had to post a forty thousand dollar cash bond out of his own pocket just to keep the injunction alive.

He did not have forty thousand dollars to spare. Friends raised it, and he paid it.

And he wrote the words that would later run in the press, words that should be carved on a wall somewhere. "I paid the cash bond because I felt, and I feel, that not only my rights are at issue in this case, but the rights of my fellow members of the record and music industry are involved."

He added one more line. "I truly hope that the future for all recording artists might hold greater security for creative property as a result of this action."

He was thirty-nine years old, sitting on a phone book to play the piano. And he was about to change the rules for every recording artist who would come after him.

While the case dragged on, Columbia put out two more of his sessions without permission, including an album it had the nerve to title "The Provocative Erroll Garner." The provocation, of course, was that he had refused to be quiet.

Three years of litigation. The most popular jazz pianist in the world sat out studio recording at the peak of his career, watching the label release his work and pocket the receipts.

In 1962, the New York State Supreme Court ruled in his favor. The settlement was $265,297.55, Columbia was ordered to return his masters, and the label was ordered to recall the unauthorized records.

He used the money to start his own label with Glaser, Octave Records. He recorded twelve more albums there over the next eighteen years, and he never went back to Columbia.

The legendary Columbia talent man John Hammond, who had signed Billie Holiday, Aretha Franklin, Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen, wrote a letter about Erroll years after his death. He called him "possibly the first Black artist, or artist of any color, to stand up to a major record company."

Hammond knew. He had been inside the industry for half a century, and Erroll was the one who drew the line.

Erroll Garner died on January 2, 1977, of cardiac arrest related to emphysema, the ci******es catching up with him at fifty-five. He is buried at Homewood Cemetery in Pittsburgh, not far from the houses where, as a child, he had first sat on a stack of books to reach the keys.

His star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame is at 6363 Hollywood Boulevard. His face is on a 1995 US postage stamp, and his "Misty" is in the Grammy Hall of Fame.

Every recording artist alive today who can stop a label from releasing an album they did not approve is standing on the phone book Erroll Garner left them. Most of them have never heard of him.

In the photograph from the studio, the corner of that phone book is peeking out from under his thigh. Once you know it is there, you cannot stop looking at it.

He sat on it to be heard. Then he made sure the rest of them would be heard too.

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