Joe Guy (musician) Joe Guy (musician) Joseph Luke Guy (September 20, 1920 – 1962) was an American jazz trumpeter. Guy had a promising career as a young progressive bop musician as he worked alongside more prominent musical acts until a drug addiction sidelined him from further success. Much of Guy's early personal life is obscured, but it is known he began his professional music career performing in New York City, and joined Fats Waller's backup band in the late 1930s. Following that, in 1938, Guy succeeded Dizzy Gillespie in Teddy Hill's orchestra, and patterned a playing style that emulated his musical role model,
Dizzy Gillespie who worked a Baltimore–Philadelphia–New York City circuit which included the Apollo Theater. Willis was not immediately friendly but Gillespie was attracted anyway. The two finally married on May 9, 1940. They remained married until his death in 1993. Gillespie stayed with Teddy Hill's band for a year, then left and free-lanced with other bands. In 1939, he joined Cab Calloway's orchestra, with which he recorded one of his earliest compositions, "Pickin' the Cabbage", in 1940. After a notorious altercation between the two men, Calloway fired Gillespie in late 1941. The incident is recounted by Gillespie and Calloway's band members Milt