Fats Waller

CTL-E-5944 · Person · musician · 1904–1943

VERIFIED evidence grade — build store (JSON graph)

Combined Graph record U-07186 · provenance: build store (JSON graph), record CTL-E-5944.

Fats Waller (Thomas Wright Waller, born May 21, 1904, New York City; died December 15, 1943, near Kansas City, of pneumonia, aboard a train) was the stride pianist, organist, composer, and comic entertainer whose playing laid much of the basis for modern jazz piano. A student of James P. Johnson, he was a professional organist at fifteen and made his first recordings in October 1922 for Okeh. Waller copyrighted more than 400 songs, many written with lyricist Andy Razaf, including “Ain't Misbehavin'” (1929, written for the revue Connie's Hot Chocolates) and “Honeysuckle Rose.” From 1934 he recorded with his small band, Fats Waller and His Rhythm, and his wit at the keyboard made him a radio and film presence as well as a hitmaker. The 1978 Broadway revue Ain't Misbehavin' built a hit show from his catalog a generation after his death at thirty-nine.

The record

• Also known as: Thomas Wright Waller

Notes

Staged 2026-10-16 under CTL-GOV-006 (Scan Tail Wave 2 — 747 Program, Wave 9; second Scan Tail packet at the founder's 40-record size). Gate A (2026-10-16): no Fats Waller entity in the live graph at 3,603 entities (exact / normalized / alias + token containment); ID CTL-E-5944 free. Supply: 747 Supply Ledger, Tier 4 — Scan Tail Wave 1 packet ordered reserve, position 19 of 20 (corpus-gap-candidates-2026-10-15.json ranked clean survivor #724). The scan supplied the NAME STRING ONLY; no fact in this record is sourced to it (CTL-GOV-004). SCOPE GATE: PASS — foundational jazz composer-pianist; his Connie's Hot Chocolates links him, in this packet, to Cab Calloway (CTL-E-5943). National-canon core scope. Vital status: DECEASED — died December 15, 1943, of pneumonia (Wikipedia; Clarke). Tribute treatment in the Curator's Judgment. STATISTICS (sourced, dated): Copyrighted songs: more than 400 (Wikipedia). “Ain't Misbehavin'” entered the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1984 and “Honeysuckle Rose” in 1999. First recordings: October 1922 (Okeh). A corpus-snippet claim placing Waller on a Chicago theater circuit was not verified in any source read in this pass and is not asserted. MEDIA: photo HELD (Fats Waller at the piano, 1930s portrait named as candidate; no file-page verification in this pass); chart FILLED (charts/chart-ctl-e-5944-fats-waller.svg); video HELD (no matching-entity CTL Short or verified-rights archival video staged); audio HELD (no rights-cleared matching-entity audio staged). MEDIA LAYER (staged 2026-10-16; full per-asset PHOTO-001 records + embed specs in the packet's staged JSON, Drive packet folder): map = N/A (Non-place record; no map attaches at the entity layer.) | visual_assets = HELD: | chart = FILLED (CTL-created SVG (black / deep red / gold) built only from this record's sourced facts) | video = HELD (No matching-entity CTL Short in the Shorts Link Map catalog (checked by name and variants), and no official/em) | audio = HELD (No recording with a CTL rights basis was staged in this pass.)

Referenced by

• Cab Calloway — collaborated with → this record

Sources

• Wikipedia, "Fats Waller" (accessed 2026-10-16) — May 21, 1904 birth, December 15, 1943 death by pneumonia at 39, the James P. Johnson tutelage, the October 1922 Okeh debut, 400+ copyrighted songs, the Razaf collaboration, and the Grammy Hall of Fame inductions (1984, 1999) — http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fats_Waller (primary source · build store)
• Donald Clarke, Encyclopedia of Popular Music, "Waller, Fats" (accessed 2026-10-16) — the specialist reference account: stride mastery, the show and song catalog, the piano-roll and accompanist years, and the Hot Chocolates (1929) credit — http://www.donaldclarkemusicbox.com/encyclopedia/detail.php?s=3680 (primary source · build store)

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Record CTL-E-5944 · Combined Graph record U-07186 · CultureTechLens Knowledge Graph · 2 sources · 1 mapped relationship.
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Researched and maintained by the CultureTechLens research program · CultureTechLens Combined Graph, Release 2026-11-04. Corrections are public: the corrections log.

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