Biography:Bill Katon

Biographical notes
 According to researcher Howard Marshall (Play Me Something Quick and Develish, 2013), Bill Katon (or Caton), was born in the Cave community, a community of free blacks established in the hills of southern Callaway County between Dixie and New Bloomfield. The community remained fairy isoloated and self-contained, but intereacted with each other and with whites at the Dixie general store. Another local musician, records Marshall, Vernon Clatterbuck, who grew up on a farm near the Cave community recalled that Katon, often wearing a suit and tie, would walk past the Victor schoolhouse in Dixie community, carrying his violin in a sackcloth. "On many occasions," writes Marshall, "the schoolteacher would hail Katon and ask him to play for the children; Katon aways obliged" (p. 121).