10 Facts About Cecil Gant

Cecil Gant was an American blues singer, songwriter and pianist, whose recordings of both ballads and "fiery piano rockers" were successful in the mid- and late 1940s, and influenced the early development of rock and roll.

Cecil Gant returned to Nashville, Tennessee and worked there as a musician, as well as touring with his own band, from the mid-1930s until he joined the army during World War II.

Arnold Shaw identified "I Wonder" as the song that "ignited the postwar blues explosion", and the success of Cecil Gant's records helped stimulate the establishment of other independent labels immediately after the war.

Cecil Gant released material through King Records, and recorded for Bullet Records in Nashville until 1949.

Cecil Gant's 1948 recording of "Nashville Jumps" opens the 2004 compilation Night Train to Nashville.

Many of Cecil Gant's records had a slow ballad as the A-side but an up-tempo boogie woogie style piano-based song or instrumental as the B-side, in many cases foreshadowing rock and roll and influential on its practitioners.

On some of his later records, Cecil Gant was credited, for unknown reasons, as Gunter Lee Carr.

In latter years Cecil Gant was married and based in Nashville.

Cecil Gant died there in 1951, at the age of 37, while preparing to leave for an engagement in Clarksdale, Mississippi.

Cecil Gant is buried in Highland Park Cemetery in Cleveland, Ohio.