Jazz legend's son made his mark in world of art, design

By TIM STANLEY World Staff Writer

His career brought him back to Tulsa, his childhood home, after working for years in New York.

In flirting briefly with a music career, Dudley Thomas knew he had, among other things, genetics going for him.

But in the end, the son of jazz legend and Muskogee native Walter "Foots" Thomas found that his Johnny Mathis-like singing style actually worked against him.

"This was the late '40s and early '50s, and I couldn't get jobs in black clubs because I didn't sound black, and I couldn't get jobs in white clubs because I wasn't white. So I just gave it all up," Thomas once told the Tulsa World.

As it turned out, he was more than amply supplied with other talents to fall back on.

An accomplished artist who worked in various media, he enjoyed a long and successful career in graphic design, first in New York and later in Tulsa.

After retiring, Thomas worked with children at Tulsa-area schools as a visiting artist, taught community arts classes and was a staff member for the Tulsa City-County Library System.

Thomas died Sunday. He was 82. A service is scheduled for 2 p.m. Monday at Ninde Brookside Funeral Home.

Walter "Foots" Thomas made his mark on the 1920s New York jazz scene as a sideman for Cab Calloway and contributed to jazz history by writing the original arrangement of "Minnie the Moocher," Calloway's most famous song.

As a boy, Dudley Thomas lived with his grandmother in Tulsa while his father was touring.

He later settled with his parents in the New York area and went on to study art at the Art Students League in New York and at Columbia University. He also served in the Navy.

Thomas went into the graphic design field, where he created album art for musicians and for many years worked in book publishing.

It was a book project, in fact, that eventually brought him back to Tulsa. Thomas returned in the mid-1980s to collaborate with his aunt, the late Cleora Butler, who had been a cook for some of Tulsa's most prominent families, on "Cleora's Kitchens: The Memoir of a Cook and Eight Decades of Great American Food."

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