Hello and welcome to This Day, a history show from Radiotopia.

My name is Jody Avergan.

This day, fall of 1964, it's the presidential election which is winding down and it is a fascinating race featuring candidates like Lyndon B. Johnson and Barry Goldwater

and Dizzy Gillespie. You want to guess which of those candidates we are devoting this episode

to? That's right. We are going to talk about the famous jazz trumpeter who threw his hat in the ring

as a candidate for the 1964 presidential election. Now, did this all start out as a bit of a joke or a

publicity stunt? Kind of. But did it end up with thousands of people voting for him and signing

petitions and a proper platform and a month's long effort with merch and swag and all the usual

trappings of a presidential campaign? Yeah, I kind of did that as well. So I really, really

love this story. I love

Dizzy Gillespie. Let's get into it. Dizzy for president. Here, as always, Nicole Hammer of

Vanderbilt and Kelly Carter Jackson of Wellesley. Hello there. Hello, Jody. You there.

This is such a wonderful story. And I know we have a lot of listeners who are maybe on the younger side or don't know, you know, too much about U.S. presidential history. But Dizzy Gillespie did not win. He did not become. Correct. I've written a lot about the 1964 election because of very gold water's run. And I can't say that Dizzy's name has ever come up, but this is still gone.

It's a great story.

I will say that I found out about this because I was watching that really excellent,

though quite long documentary soundtrack to Akuta Ta, which was all about CIA and the kind

of like U.S.

Muse culture, musicians particularly in Africa, to both spread U.S. cultural imperialism and overthrow

some governments. And a lot of jazz musicians were implicated in that. And there was just a little

snippet in there that showed, it was like a 15 second moment of like a clip of Dizzy Gillespie

talking about being a candidate for president. And I was like, wait a minute, what? And then I

went down the rabbit hole and here we are doing the episode. So people may not have known that Dizzy Gillespie ran for president. People may not know that much about Dizzy Gillespie himself. So, Kelly, tell us who is Dizzy Gillespie? Well, John Berks Gillespie. I was like, wait, that's his real name. Yes, John Berks Gillespie. It's from

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