Frank Driggs

Frank Driggs first became enamored with jazz and swing music listening to late-night broadcasts from hotels and ballrooms in the 1930s.

A 1952 Princeton University graduate with a degree in political science, Driggs moved to Manhattan where he worked first as an NBC page.

Soon after Driggs moved to Manhattan in 1952, he began gathering and saving posters, flyers and ticket stubs, recordings and amateur photographs, providing invaluable information to journalists and music fans decades later that would have otherwise been lost.

Many of the photographed are not labeled or indexed since Driggs relied on his own system of sorting and his own personal memory of the musicians in the pictures.

For many years Driggs kept his collection of images in his basement of his home in Flatbush until 2005 when he moved in with the late musicologist and writer Joan Peyser in the Manhattan borough of New York City.