Butch Thompson (born November 28, 1943 in Marine on St. Croix, Minnesota, died 14 August 2022 in Saint Paul, Minnesota) was an American jazz pianist and clarinetist best known for his ragtime and stride performances.He was tall with a distinctive mustache and magical fingers. Long fingers that ran down the Mississippi and connected to New Orleans.

Butch Thompson was a Minnesota musical giant, the original pianist on the radio show A Prairie Home Companion, a stride and ragtime piano expert who consulted on a Broadway musical, a pop musician who performed with orchestras from Cairo until Tokyo played.

“His knowledge of stride piano and ability to perform it was second to none,” said Steve Heckler, founder of the Twin Cities Jazz Festival, where Thompson played for many years.

“In a word, Butch was a musician,” said Crescent City trumpeter Clive Wilson, who performed regularly with Thompson at the New Orleans Jazz Festival. “It’s hard to imagine a world of New Orleans jazz without Butch.”

Thompson died Sunday at his home in St. Paul of complications from Alzheimer’s. He was 78.

“He wanted the end to come home and I was so happy that I could do that for him,” his wife, Mary Ellen Niedenfuer Thompson, said via email. “He knew he was home, he said he wanted to play the piano… through the fog of terminal dementia. I’m so glad he knew he was home with me and the dogs.”

“There was a handful of times we played an impromptu duet with the band, whereupon he turned to me and said, with a smile twitching from under his mustache in the manner of a compliment, ‘I’ve never heard anything like it! ‘” recalled Southside Aces leader Tony Balluff, who plays the clarinet, Thompson’s other instrument.

Though Thompson got his professional start on the clarinet as a teenager playing traditional jazz with the Hall Brothers, he rose to local prominence as the original resident pianist – and later music director – of Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion (PHC).

“His piano and clarinet playing were the real deal,” said Richard Dworsky, Twin Cities’ piano maestro, who succeeded Thompson at PHC and has been with him on PHC cruises and in the 2006 Robert Altman film A Prairie Home Companion played. “Sometimes flashy and virtuoso, and sometimes spare, slow and soulful.”

Colleagues described Thompson as a humble, gentle man.

“He was very generous – he always wanted to make audiences happy – and his self-mockery was very famous,” said Michele Jansen, former general manager at KBEM-FM (Jazz 88), where Thompson hosted the weekly show “Jazz Originals” 25 For years, until 2017. “He was funny, with such a dry sense of humor.”

Patty Peterson’s program preceded Thompson’s on Sunday nights. “It was amazing how much money he was making in pledges in an hour because of his popularity,” she said.

Richard Thompson Jr. grew up in Marine on St. Croix and began taking piano lessons at the age of 6. There were two defining moments in his childhood: he saw a film of Sugar Chile Robinson playing boogie-woogie with tiny hands in the village hall, and at his own Junior High Talent Show in 1956, he got a rousing reaction to his boogie-woogie -Piano arrangement of Bill Haley & the Comets “Rock Around the Clock”.

As a child, Thompson became a serious record collector of jazz, which his father promoted, as well as rock ‘n’ roll and R&B. His interest was further sparked by attending concerts by jazz star Louis Armstrong and classical piano master Arthur Rubinstein in Minneapolis.

At Stillwater High School, Thompson took up the clarinet, which he began playing in sixth grade. With some classmates he formed Shirt Thompson and His Sleeves to play at dances.

In 1961, while studying at the University of Minnesota, the clarinettist sat in on the Hall Brothers New Orleans Jazz Band of Minneapolis. A year later, he officially joined the group and was playing seedy bars on Hennepin Avenue, despite not being old enough to buy a drink. Then, two months after signing, Thompson made his first trip to Crescent City.

“When I came to New Orleans, I was just blown away by this music,” he explained in a 2020 interview.

After two years of service in the Army, Thompson returned to the U. Unable to pay all the bills at the Hall Brothers concerts, he slogged away as a newspaper reporter, then taught ragtime piano and jazz history at the West Bank School of Music. In 1974 he began his twelve-year tenure at PHC.

The classical world also beckoned for a prominent soloist at pop concerts, beginning in 1987 with Thompson’s performance of Scott Joplin’s Suite for Piano and Orchestra. The pianist/clarinetist has traveled the world and played everywhere from Tokyo to Cairo.

Thompson has released more than two dozen albums under his own name and appeared on numerous other records, including a Grammy-winning 1996 project by trumpeter Doc Cheatham.

A well-known jazz historian, Thompson was a consultant on the 1992 Broadway musical “Jelly’s Last Jam,” about Jelly Roll Morton’s piano jazz.

Survivors include his wife, sons Victor and Sam; stepdaughter Frannie Christensen; Brothers Peter and John, sister Barbara Raff and two grandchildren. A private funeral will be held in Marine on St. Croix with a public celebration of life to be planned later.