During his long career, Ferbos worked with some of the giants of early traditional jazz, including Captain John Handy and Mamie Smith, and, in later years, with widely recognized contemporary revivals of the old style music like the original stage band of the off-Broadway hit One Mo' Time.

So he got an old cornet at a pawn shop on Rampart Street and began lessons with Professor Paul Chaligny, an exacting Creole task-master who would not let him blow the horn until he knew how to read music and had mastered the rudiments of theory.

In the 1940s, he played on Lake Pontchartrain at the Happy Landing and Mama Lou's, and in the '50s he worked with Harold Dejan at the Melody Inn, where he recorded with the "Mighty Four."

When Danny Barker founded the now-famous Fairview Baptist band to train a young generation of New Orleans musicians, Ferbos was asked to write out all their charts.

However, he made eight tours of Europe with the New Orleans Ragtime Orchestra, formed to revive the old music unearthed in the jazz archives at Tulane University.

Ferbos won the 2003 Big Easy Lifetime Achievement Award and was frequently called on to tell about his experiences in the Depression, as well as in music and with tinsmithing, on panels and in history classes.

In 2005, Hurricane Katrina forced him to Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, where he lived with relatives until he could return to his native New Orleans.