Mar-Apr 2004

Billy Hall played with orchestras in Toronto, St. Marys (Ontario), London (England), Belgium, and Germany, and with military bands of the Canadian Army. While serving in France in 1916, he was wounded at the Somme, and eventually died from his wound.

More than a sought-after musician, he was also a family man, with two children and a lovely wife. His life story is an interesting combination of music and family.

In 1892, Lieutenant Gianni Bettini and his wife, Jeanie E. "Daisy" Abbott Bettini, moved into a lofty, red brick house at the corner of Fifty-seventh Street and Sixth Avenue, New York City. This was the Sherwood, the up-town headquarters of Art. Accounts by live-in Sherwood manager and unofficial master of ceremonies for its several restaurants, painter J. Carroll Beckwith, as well as others who chronicled events involving the Sherwoodites, as the residents called themselves, have provided us with revealing glimpses of the lieutenant's life.

Bettini may have initially met some of those who recorded for him, including Mark Twain, through the Sherwood social scene and his penchant for displaying his inventions at world fairs was undoubtedly influenced by his Sherwood friends. Several of them, including Beckwith, showed their work at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago, and Gianni Bettini was there too, with a space in the Italian Pavilion.