Ron McCroby

Ron McCroby was a master of the rarely practiced art of jazz whistling, blessed with amazingly sure intonation and technical control that allowed him to mimic bebop players' lines with a clarity that made it sound as though he were playing a piccolo. In fact, McCroby delighted in describing his "instrument" as a "puccolo" (a conflation of "piccolo" and "pucker"). He was born in 1934 and grew up in Morgantown, WV, where he played clarinet in the high-school marching band. It was there that he made his musical whistling debut, filling in the piccolo part in "Stars and Stripes Fo...