Korla Pandit - Early Career

Early Career

In 1921, Pandit was born John Roland Redd in St. Louis, Missouri, to an African-American family. The next year, his family moved to Hannibal, Missouri where they lived for nine years. In 1931 the family moved to Columbia, Missouri. Pandit's father was Ernest Redd, an African-American man, and his mother was Doshia O'Nina Redd, of French and African blood. Pandit had two brothers and four sisters, all light-skinned like himself. He attended a segregated school and learned to play piano. A contemporary of his, jazz pianist "Sir" Charles Thompson, knew him during that time; he said that John Roland Redd was the better piano player.

Pandit's first work for radio was in 1938 with the Central Broadcasting Company in Des Moines, Iowa. Arriving in Los Angeles, California by 1939, John Roland Redd donned a turban and performed under the name Juan Rolando. His sister, Frances Redd, was an actress in the film Midnight Shadow (1939), and his turban resembled the one worn by John Criner's character, Prince Alihabad, in Midnight Shadow.

During the mid-1940s, as Juan Rolando, he played the organ on the Los Angeles radio station KMPC, and he performed in various supper clubs and lounges. He also was heard on Jubilee, the program of black jazz and swing bands transcribed by the Special Services of the War Department for airing to WWII servicemen overseas.

In 1944, he married Disney artist Beryl June DeBeeson, and the two reinvented his image, eventually replacing "Juan Rolando" with "Korla Pandit" and fabricating a romantic history for him as a baby born in New Delhi, India to a Brahmin priest and a French opera singer, who traveled from India via England, finally arriving in the United States.