Ancestry
Lewis was born Joseph Louis Francois Zenon, in the French Quarter of New Orleans, Louisiana. Lewis' great-great grandmother by his mother, Alice Zeno, was a Senegalese slave who was brought over to Louisana around 1803. Zeno's family retained some knowledge of Senegalese language and customs until Alice's generation.
Read more about this topic: George Lewis (clarinetist)
Famous quotes containing the word ancestry:
“Both the ancestry and posterity of Grief go further than the ancestry and posterity of Joy.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“The Democratic Party is like a mule. It has neither pride of ancestry nor hope of posterity.”
—Ignatius Donnelly (1831–1901)
“I am, in point of fact, a particularly haughty and exclusive person, of pre-Adamite ancestral descent. You will understand this when I tell you that I can trace my ancestry back to a protoplasmal primordial atomic globule.”
—Sir William Schwenck Gilbert (1836–1911)