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Artist
Jimmy Rhodes
12+ albums
breaks
about
Jimmy Rhodes, a multi-talented musician, is a well-known performer and businessman. A gifted keyboard stylist on both piano and organ, he is also an accomplished brass performer. Although he started his career as a music educator, teaching at two academies in California, he has since been involved in a variety of music related activities, including professional performance, recording, composing and arranging, accompanying, operation of music stores, and music therapy. Rhodes was born and raised on a cotton farm in Chesterfield, Tennessee, where his parents were sharecroppers and he was known at age seven for being the best cotton picker in the county. When he was nine, his parents became Seventh-day Adventists. At that time, his mother talked his father into buying an old, used upright piano for $100. She ordered a music correspondence course, learned to play hymns on the piano, and then taught her son how to read music and play the instrument. Although he initially resisted being a musician, Jimmy learned quickly, and by the time he was ten, he was playing for services, weddings, funerals, and other events. From 1950 to 1952, he attended Highland Academy in Tennessee, where Terry Trivett, a younger student at the school, later recalled Rhodes as the "most talented person anyone in that area knew. He thrived on playing several instruments, sometimes more than one at a time. He exuded talent." Jimmy moved to Collegedale, Tennessee, where Southern Missionary College, now Sou
