CChick Webb's band, the Savoy Sultans, was driven by Webb's phenomenal sense of rhythm and virtuoso drumming. He was one of a handful of drummers who broke away from the four-square bass accompaniments characteristic of the time. Webb was renowned for his immaculate technique and the intensity and precision of his playing. He virtually changed the course of jazz drumming and contributed a series of spectacular hits to the repertoire that included Stompin' at the Savoy, Blue Lou, and Don't Be That Way.

The ascent of the Savoy Sultans coincided with the era of the legendary battles of the bands. Groups led by Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Jimmy Lunceford, and Webb would come together for twin bills at dance halls in black communities to see which orchestra could outplay the other. Mounted policemen were often called out to control the crowds when Webb played for the Battles of the Bands at the Savoy in Harlem. Two sharp thunderclaps from Webb's bass drums heralded the beginning of his acts. Crowds began to roar before the band had played a single note.

Webb was born on Baltimore's east side on February 10, 1909, one of three children. His career was a study in beating the odds: He was crippled by spinal tuberculosis, and he was poor. His diminutive size earned him the nickname "Chick." His fragile health frequently interrupted his schooling at P.S. No. 105 on East Street near Lexington.

To divert himself from his illness and from boredom, Webb began to drum, using pots and pans, or whatever he could find. Elsie Matthews, a neighbor driven to distraction by the sounds emanating from the Webb household, bought Webb his first drum from a store on Gay Street. The respite lasted only a few days before the rapping started up again. With a broad grin, Webb told his neighbor: "Miss Elsie, I busted my drum." (Baltimore Afro-American, July 1, 1939.)

The young Webb beat out rhythms on garbage cans and along the fences of East Baltimore. With money he made selling the Afro-American on Gay and Aisquith streets, he bought a set of cheap drums and joined a local band playing week-end gigs. He also joined a small group called Jazzola Band that worked on excursion boats on the Chesapeake Bay and became friends with guitarist John Trueheart. Still in their teens, Webb and Trueheart moved to New York in 1924. Webb played pick-up jobs in the city and became acquainted with Duke Ellington, Coleman Hawkins, and other musicians performing at the Rhythm Club on 132nd Street and Seventh Avenue. Through Ellington, Webb began his career as a bandleader at the Black Bottom Club.

Webb hit his stride in 1930 when his band opened at the famed Savoy. Bennie Carter was doing some of the band's arrangements and, later, Edgar Sampson, one of the best arrangers of the era, brought Webb the fabulously successful "Stompin' at the Savoy" and "Don't Be That Way." The band developed a distinctive style and became one of the outstanding bands of the swing era.

In 1934, Webb's band played at the Apollo Theatre. There he met a teenage singer named Ella Fitzgerald who was performing in an amateur contest. Webb engaged Fitzgerald to perform with the Savoy Sultans, and that same year she made her first recording with the band, "Love and Kisses," and had her first hit, "A-Tisket, A-Tasket," which she helped to write. Ella and the band recorded 150 sides during their years together.

Like many Maryland musicians, including Eubie Blake, Webb never put his birthplace behind him. He returned time and again to play for community benefits, at Pennsylvania Avenue's famed Royal Theatre, and in Cambridge on the Eastern Shore.

Throughout his career Webb was plagued with recurring bouts of illness which he concealed from his audience and, when he could, from the men in his band. He returned to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore for treatments and back surgery with such frequency that they named one of the Halstead rooms for him. Sensitive about his condition, Webb made it a point to be seated on stage, surrounded by an array of traps, drums, snares, and assorted percussion instruments when the curtain went up so the audience watching from the front would not be aware of his disabilities.

The Savoy Sultans had been on tour in Washington when a bout of ill health forced Webb off stage. He returned to Baltimore to see his long-time friend and physician, Dr. Ralph J. Young, who rushed him straight to the Johns Hopkins Hospital, Halstead 2. Two weeks later, on June 16, 1939, jazz drummer Chick Webb, the hottest swing band leader in the country, died at the age of thirty. News of Webb's death reached the band while they were performing in Montgomery, Alabama. They cancelled the remainder of the tour, boarded their bus and headed for Baltimore.

The funeral service at Waters African Methodist Episcopal Church on Aisquith Street drew thousands of mourners to the overflowing church. The Savoy Sultans played a requiem Webb himself had worked out just weeks before his death for "some Memorial Day" (Baltimore Evening Sun, July 20, 1939). At the service, Ella Fitzgerald sang "My Buddy" through tears.

A year and two days after Webb's last birthday, his friends and fellow musicians boarded a train from New York to Baltimore to play a memorial concert for Webb at the Fifth Regiment Armory on Howard Street. The line-up for the concert included the Ink Spots, Duke and Mercer Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Benny Carter, Bubby Johnson and his band and the eighty member Colored Baltimore Chorus. The proceeds of that euphoric one-night-stand created the Chick Webb Recreation Center Memorial Fund. The Chick Webb Recreation Center at 623 N. Eden Street became a reality in 1946.