Benjamin Shook [biography]
A musician who was well-versed in almost all musical idioms except the blues, Benjamin Shook was a bandleader in Detroit from the end of the 19th century into the 1930s. According to Blesh and Janis, authors of They All Played Ragtime, the bands of Theodore Finney, Fred S. Stone, and Benjamin Shook "...monopolized the city's entertainment and social world to the almost complete exclusion of white performers ... up into the 1920s." Shook and Stone took over Finney's band soon after his death in 1899. By the middle of the 1920s, Shook was leading and booking several bands which played almost exclusively to white audiences. One of his few surviving compositions, "Dat Gal O' Mine," shows that he had mastered the new syncopated style early in his career.