Fred died Mar. 18, 1995. He was 80. He prepared at Solebury School. At Princeton, he majored in Modern languages (French).
Fred was a prolific freelance writer and historian of black culture in America. He was a renowned scholar of jazz. For years, he traveled the South editing and recording black folk music, country, church music, and the blues.
In the late 1930s, he coedited jazzmen, The Story of Hot jazz and produced Music from the South, a ten-volume set of selections that has been released in part by the Smithsonian Institution. He also produced a series of historical recordings titled Jazz and wrote Been Here and Gone about black music in the South.
Fred was a former staff member of the Saturday Review and was a TV writer and producer for CBS, NBC, and ABC and for Time-Life Records. He also served as a consultant on educational programs for the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers and for the Hogan Jazz Archives at Tulane, He was a fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and The Natl. Endowment for the Humanities.
His last major project, finished in 1988, was a series of interviews on jazz, Been Here and Gone: The Ramsey Chronicles, which were broadcast on Natl. Public Radio. Fred is survived by son Loch and daughters Alida Porter and Martha. Fred left a legacy of an outstanding history of jazz in America.