March 10 Illinois History Minute

It’s March Tenth, the birthday of Edward Baker Lincoln, second son of Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln. Eddie Lincoln was born in 1846, and died of tuberculosis, a month before his fourth birthday. He was the first of three Lincoln children to die before reaching adulthood. His remains rest near his father’s at the Lincoln Tomb at Oak Ridge Cemetery in Springfield.

That’s music by pioneering jazz cornetist Bix Beiderbecke, who was born this day in 1903 in Davenport, on the Iowa side of the Quad Cities. At age 18, his parents sent him to a boarding school in the Chicago suburbs, where he would often travel into Chicago to hear --- and sometimes sit in with --- jazz bands at nightclubs and speakeasies.