The Dukes of Dixieland are really the story of two bands. The original Dukes were formed in 1948 by brothers Frank Assunto on trumpet and Fred Assunto on trombone, with their father "Papa Jac" Assunto on trombone and banjo, plus clarinetist Jack Maheu, pianist Stanley Mendelsohn, drummer Tommy Rundell, and tuba player Barney Mallon. That band played with Pete Fountain, recorded with Louis Armstrong, cut the first stereo record on the Audio Fidelity label in November 1957, and sent their 1958 album "Marching Along with the Dukes of Dixieland, Volume 3" to No. 6 on the US charts.
When the original band dissolved in the early 1970s, TV producer and manager John Shoup restarted the Dukes in April 1974 with cornetist Connie Jones as leader, leasing Louis Prima's old club atop the Monteleone Hotel in the French Quarter and renaming it Duke's Place. The band ran its own French Quarter clubs through the 1980s — Duke's Place (1974–1986) and Mahogany Hall (1981–1992) — then settled aboard the Steamboat Natchez in the early 1990s, playing the dinner cruise nightly.
The restarted Dukes collected a string of recording firsts: the first direct-to-disk album in 1978 and, in 1984, the first jazz band to record on CD. Their 2001 gospel album Gloryland was nominated for a Grammy Award, and 2011 brought Country Meets Dixie, a Nashville collaboration with the Oak Ridge Boys. They have performed with more than 30 symphony orchestras, including the New York Pops at Carnegie Hall, and in 2005 they took the Natchez up the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers to Cincinnati to raise money for the Bush-Clinton Katrina Relief Fund while many of the band members' own homes still lay in ruins.
The band on this page is the post-1974 Dukes, led by trumpeter Kevin Clark — the frontman since 1989, and again from 2010 — whose current lineup keeps the Natchez cruises, club dates, and festival sets swinging. A word about the name: the Dukes of Dixieland have not been affiliated with the Assunto family since 1974, and a court settlement requires that Shoup's band imply no historical connection to the pre-1974 Assunto band. The Assunto heirs run their own site (thedukesofdixieland.com) and a tribute band, the Assunto Dukes.
