After a pause, we return to the mystery of Poochie’s missing chronicle. I have outlined Dr. George Joseph “Poochie” Ross’s career and discussed the circumstances of his sudden death in 1993. In future posts, I will investigate his career and teaching philosophy in greater depth, as well as share new information about the fate of his personal archive after his death. Today I want to talk about where Poochie came from.

Poochie’s father was named George Washington (1907-1987). The 1930 Census noted both George (senior) and his father Peter W. Ross worked as laborers at the Richmond city dairy. After the war, Poochie’s father worked at Pritchard Bros. auto garage on Marshall Street in the Church Hill neighborhood of Richmond where George (junior) grew up and attended segregated Richmond Public Schools (RPS). Peter became a minister. Poochie’s mother was Lorraine Viola Banks (1916-1985). Her people came from Amelia County, Va. She and George, Sr. were married in Richmond on September 14, 1935. Poochie was born November 29, 1938.

“I’m from an area where it was just middle to low class,” Ross told Terry Weiss of the University of Maryland Diamondback newspaper in 1988, “where people were blue-collar, and worked hard and I had gone on and gotten a doctorate.”

Ross’s youth was rich in other ways. He attended school and played in marching band with jazz keyboard pioneer Lonnie Liston Smith, then a tuba player. Music teacher Jay Peters, on sabbatical from Lionel Hampton’s band, gave Ross his start on saxophone—“one of the most gifted students he had ever come in contact with.” Ross started gigging in Richmond at age 15. “I started playing there professionally…with some of the top musicians of that time—some of them were playing with Lionel Hampton and the other traveling or territorial bands,” like bassist Bill Littlejohn, who played with Fletcher Henderson. Later, during a short stint as a Richmond music teacher himself, Ross performed at the Old Devils Club with Paul Gonsalves of the Duke Ellington Orchestra.

Although Ross was an only child and his parents were not musicians, George, Sr. had grown up with a foster brother, James Wade, who was. Wade—a renowned tenor (voice) soloist—majored in music at Virginia State College and joined the famous de Paur Infantry Chorus upon graduating VSC in 1952. The chorus’s founder and conductor Leonard de Paur studied at Columbia University and the Institute of Musical Arts (later Juilliard), was associate conductor of the Hall Johnson Choir and director of the New York City Negro Unit of the Federal Theatre. During WWII, de Paur was musical director of the Army Air Force show “Winged Victory.” After the war, members of his US Army 372nd Glee Club formed the de Paur Infantry Chorus and became one of Columbia Records’ most popular groups for the next decade, recording at the same famous 30th Street Studio (a.k.a., “the Church”) as Miles Davis.

Ross’s Uncle Ward, the tenor soloist, eventually became a music educator in Richmond Public Schools, music specialist for Richmond’s Department of Recreation, and also a minister of music with several Richmond church choirs. Poochie’s father may have been blue collar, but his son’s musical milieu was blue chip. It didn’t hurt that Poochie was also brilliant and energetic. At Armstrong HS, in addition to band (Maurice Williams, dir.), he played football and was a member of the Math Club and the National Honor Society.

Poochie Ross followed Ward to VSC where he was a classmate of Boston jazz saxophonist and organizer Sonny Carrington and studied music with Nathaniel Gatlin, Claiborne Richardson, and the great Undine Smith Moore. While jazz had been strictly verboten on campus during Billy Taylor’s time there in the ‘30s, by the late ‘50s VSC students were “thrilled” about it. Ross performed with a group known as the Augmented Six, which included another future RPS music educator, Hugo Van Jackson.

At that time in Virginia to be young, gifted, and Black meant being unwelcome at any of the Commonwealth’s graduate degree programs. So in 1961 Ross headed north to work toward his Master of Music degree at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, following in the footsteps of fellow VSC graduate Leon Thompson (the late director of music at Abyssinian Baptist Church and former director of educational activities for the New York Philharmonic) and fellow Richmonder Paul Freeman (founder of the Chicago Sinfonietta and former music director of the Czech National Philharmonic Orchestra in Prague).

Poochie Ross’s blues march was just beginning…