In a little honky-tunky village in Texas, there's a guy who plays the best piano by far.

When he plays with the bass and guitar, they holler, beat me, Daddy, ate to the bar.

Don Ray, Huey Price, and Ray McKinley.

Welcome to the history of the 20th century.

The 20th century. Episode 425, Episode 425, 8 to the Bar.

Adolf Sax was born in 1814 in what is now Belgium.

His parents were makers of musical instruments, and Adolf began making his own

musical instruments in his early teens. He also learned to play the flute and the clarinet. In the

course of his life, Sax designed a number of novel musical instruments, mostly variant forms of brass instruments.

He is best known today for the instrument he invented and patented while he was living in Paris in

1846. His goal was to create a variant of the bass clarinet, something that combined the flexibility

and technical ease of a clarinet with the loudness and

versatility of a brass instrument. The resulting instrument he named the saxophone.

French composer Ector Berlioz took an early interest in the instrument, and for a time, classical

composers included saxophone scores in their compositions. But the classical world lost interest

in the instrument by the end of the 19th century. Sax himself envisioned the instrument primarily

for use in military bands, and indeed a number of European

militaries incorporated saxophones into their bands. Saxophones began to be manufactured in the

United States at the turn of the 20th century. American instrument makers refined the design,

and the instrument began to appear in military bands,

marching bands, and later in ragtime bands and dance bands. The instrument's ability to make

comical sounds invited its use in vaudeville. But the place where the saxophone truly found its

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