"I would do anything to keep my sons out of the mines," Thomas Francis Dorsey once said, and he built the escape route himself. Born in 1872 in Pennsylvania's anthracite coal country, he mined coal before teaching himself music. He drilled his sons on cornet, then split them onto the instruments that would make them famous — Jimmy onto reeds, Tommy onto brass — inside the parade and concert bands he led. In 1920 the family settled in Lansford, Pennsylvania, where he took over the municipal band and taught music around town, a strict disciplinarian who, jazz historian Gunther Schuller wrote, gave his sons "a solid technical foundation," though Schuller argued real jazz reached them only secondhand. He died in July 1942, following a series of strokes; Tommy missed a broadcast to attend the funeral. Everything the brothers became as bandleaders started as their father's lesson plan.