When I first started thinking about Billy Tipton, I think my first reaction was the kind of fantasy of what kind of a star they might have been, you know, if only weren't held back by not being able to present publicly and claim this identity.

But there's a lot about Billy Tipton that we really just don't know,

and even more that in some ways is fundamentally unknowable.

That's music journalist Alison McCabe, talking about jazz pianist Billy Tipton.

One of the ways that current music, culture, and fandom really operates now is, you know, when we excavate these heroes and lost masterpieces, we naturally think about, oh, what could have been, or this, and we look at these things for sometimes this easy framework of this person's been erased out of music history for reasons of either their identity

or the opportunities that weren't properly afforded to them.

But in a lot of ways, Billy Tipton's story resists that and resist so many of these categorizations and these what-ifs

and presents us with something that requires

that we really come to this with nuance and curiosity.

Yeah, I agree with you 100%.

I think that when you work with somebody like Billy Tipton, it was in really trying to

understand like how courageous this person was, you know,

that even though they were confined in their choices in some way, they actually were able to go

quite far with that.

I think his story is still something that is important to share and has something in there

for people today to understand not just identity in the past, but identity as we

experience it currently.

Hi, I'm Jessica Hopper. And from KCRW, this is Lost Notes. Billy Tipton was in a star or a virtuoso.

From the 1930s, until the late 50s, he was working-class journeyman musician touring small clubs all over America.

He performed on variety shows and recorded two albums for a no-name record label.

Then, in 1958, Tipton walked away from his life as a musician.

He settled down, started a family in the suburbs outside Spokane, Washington,

...