As the nation celebrates its 250th, Undermainarts.org brings to this history party the stories of selected Kentucky artists whose works have gained national recognition. 

 January, 2026 

Les McCann: No Forcing, No Fear 

By David T. Miller 
Contributing Writer

The East End

Music was everywhere in Lexington’s East End when Leslie Coleman “Les” McCann was a boy — at Shiloh Baptist Church; in local parks, where brass bands and small combos set up in the bandshell on most weekends; and especially at the Lyric Theatre. The theater, a few steps from McCann’s door, opened in 1948 when he was 13 and quickly became the neighborhood’s cultural centerpiece.

Segregation made the neighborhood invisible to much of the city, but it also made it self-sufficient, vibrant and musically rich. A steady stream of musicians on the Southern Black entertainment circuit passed through, appearing at the Lyric, Dixieland Gardens or the many smaller, rougher clubs on Deweese Street. McCann got a job sweeping up at the Lyric, listening to the performers such as Cab Calloway, Lionel Hampton and Count Basie banter as they packed up their gear. Sometimes he carried their bags for tips. 

Les was the oldest of James and Anna McCann’s six children, five boys and a girl. James had a good job with the water company, and the family had enough but not much more. They were a close-knit family and enjoyed singing together in church. James listened to country and swing and Anna hummed opera as she went about her housework. 

Anna’s mother used to play a little but had given it up and gave the McCanns her old piano when Les was a toddler. Some of the keys didn’t work, but he was fascinated by it from the time he could reach the keyboard. “He could really pick out tunes when he was about three or four years old,” his mother said. “We could never stay in church. When the organ started playing, or the piano … we'd have to get up and go out. He'd get happy and twisting and turning and screaming and howling.” 

His parents arranged a few piano lessons for Les when he was 6 but his teacher died unexpectedly. After that he mostly taught himself. 

Outside the house, school — first at Constitution (known as Colored School No. 2) and then at Dunbar High — offered a new range of music to help shape McCann’s style. Dunbar’s band director, Charles Quillings, a trumpeter and jazz fan, had known Les all his life and said it was obvious from elementary school that he was passionate about music in any form. Quillings became a mentor. He took McCann to see a symphony orchestra and McCann was “the happiest child you've ever seen.” 

Les joined the band but was kicked out briefly (“I was always showing off and beating on things when I shouldn’t be,” he said) until Quillings gave him a good talking to and let him back in. He stayed after school to show McCann how the band instruments worked. The band had acquired a sousaphone (the marching band equivalent of a tuba), and no one could figure out how it worked, so again Les taught himself. Sometimes he marched up and down his street playing it. 

He soon learned to play drums too and was named assistant band leader. At just 29 members, the Dunbar band was tight and creative, thanks in large part to McCann’s drumming. “I loved the marching feel,” he said later. “I used to make up the beats, the rhythms that we used. We tried to be different from all the other schools in town.” 

Dunbar was usually placed at the end of parades, behind the white schools, which McCann blamed on racism. Then someone — likely Quillings — told him that Dunbar was in the back because it was the best; the organizers didn’t want anyone leaving the parade early. 

Even without an instrument in his hands, he was obsessed with beats. He was a self-described basketball fanatic, both playing it and watching it. “That’s what we were raised on in Kentucky,” he said. “Basketball is rhythm.” He also became a champion at “hambone,” the folk tradition of body percussion that arose when enslaved Africans were forbidden to use drums. When he wasn’t marching or playing basketball, he was at the keys or singing, sometimes late into the night. His brother Bill also learned some piano, and their sister Carma took up the violin. Their father said, “I was in bed but I couldn’t go to sleep,” with “everybody making all that racket.” 

Les was obsessed with music in a way his siblings weren’t. Sometimes he would get up in the wee hours and start playing piano. His parents saw how driven he was and indulged him.

His musical world opened up even more when his father got a little extra money and bought a better radio. He stumbled on the “Randy’s Record Shop” show from Gallatin,Tennessee coming in loud and clear after the sun went down. It offered R&B, blues and jazz by the likes of Nat King Cole, Louis Jordan and Charlie Parker. McCann stayed up late, listening.

All of this — church music, marching band, the Lyric and those late-night radio broadcasts — left him hungry for a bigger stage than segregated Lexington could offer.

Becoming Les McCann

By his senior year of high school, his hometown felt less like a waiting room. He wanted to drop out of school, but his parents and Quillings conspired to convince him to stay. There wasn’t much for him in segregated Lexington, and a trusted teacher told him, “Whatever you do, when you finish school just get out of town.” He did, he said, “like a shot.” He left home right after graduating in 1952, at just seventeen, trading the East End for the West Coast. 

After a year struggling to find work in music, he joined the Navy to earn money for college, finding a niche on drums and sousaphone in the Drum and Bugle Corps. Quillings may have influenced him — he had played trumpet in the Army Ground Forces Band during World War II. 

Off-duty, McCann hung around jazz clubs and practiced piano when he could. He began to develop his own style, influenced especially by Erroll Garner. But McCann’s first taste of show business came as a singer. Winning a 1956 Navy talent contest earned him his first trip to New York and an appearance on the “The Ed Sullivan Show” (where he was mistakenly billed as “Leslei McCann”). 

He served out his time in the Navy, and after his discharge, enrolled at Los Angeles City College to study music, as well as taking classes in drama and broadcasting. Los Angeles sanded away at his rough edges. Always athletic, he joined the swim team and played both basketball and tennis. An English teacher told him he needed to improve his enunciation. “I had a Kentucky twang — no one could understand me,” he said. He stopped mentioning his affinity for hambone because, he said, some Black people considered it a vestige of “Uncle Tom” in an era when many in the civil rights movement distanced themselves from Southern folk traditions.

He didn’t finish college (“the school didn’t teach me a thing, except one teacher,” he said) and did a little of everything after dropping out, including working in nightclubs as an announcer and emcee. He briefly served as the doorman at the Black Hawk nightclub in San Francisco, allowing him to sidle up to some of the biggest names in jazz. 

McCann only knew a few songs but talked his way into a solo piano gig at the famed Purple Onion nightclub in 1956. Two years later, McCann was ready to bring his music to the wider world. He moved back to L.A. and, in 1958, began performing solo in small coffeehouses, with a regular job at The Bit on the Sunset Strip. 

Jazz trumpeter Miles Davis happened to hear him there and recommended him to saxophonist “Cannonball” Adderley, but McCann wanted to do things his own way. Instead of joining Adderley, he formed the “Les McCann Ltd.” trio, with Leroy Vinnegar on bass and Ron Jefferson on drums.

The group quickly made a name for itself with a series of well-received club dates, and in 1960 he signed with the Pacific Jazz record label, releasing his first two albums the same year, one of them live at The Bit. The label sent the trio to New York and Paris in 1961 and 1962, where they played small nightclubs and opened larger shows for Count Basie and Ray Charles. For the next few years he seemed to be everywhere, from one-day festivals in the Midwest and Europe to weeks-long club residencies in Detroit, Seattle and Los Angeles.