Jane Little stood four feet, eleven inches tall and weighed less than a hundred pounds. Yet she played the double bass, the largest instrument in the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, and one that stood a good foot taller than she did.
She was Jane Findley and sixteen years old when she joined the Atlanta Youth Symphony Orchestra in 1945. She made her debut that February 4 wearing a pastel evening gown, and she remained with the group when it began to admit adults and grew into the Atlanta Symphony.
Jane married the symphony’s principal flutist in 1953. Warren Little was six foot two and would carry his little flute and her big bass. Even after he retired, he’d drive her to and from Atlanta Symphony Hall in their big baby-blue Chevrolet Caprice Classic station wagon. During her career, Jane played for conductors such as Igor Stravinsky, Leopold Stokowski, Aaron Copland, and James Levine. In 1996 she performed at the opening and closing ceremonies of the Atlanta Summer Olympics with conductor John Williams.
The highlight of her symphonic career came on February 4, 2016, two days after she celebrated her eighty-seventh birthday. Jane wasn’t in the best of health that day. She’d been undergoing chemotherapy treatment for multiple myeloma and had suffered a cracked vertebra the previous August, but after months of rehabilitation she was ready to play the double bass once more. The Washington Post reported on the occasion: “On Monday, Jane Little got her weekly chemo shot. Thursday, she gulped down five green steroid pills and reported to Symphony Hall to fight her way back to the stage. And that she did, all 98 pounds of her, stroking a D chord at 8:04 p.m. to make her comeback official.”
With that stroke of the bow, Jane Little became holder of the Guinness World Record as the musician with the longest tenure with an orchestra. With seventy-one years, she passed the record set by Frances Darger, the violinist who’d retired in 2012 after seventy years with the Utah Symphony. Indeed, the prospect of taking the title was one reason Jane decided to return to the symphony for one last season, despite serious illness and injuries.
“I’d thumb through the Guinness book and say, ‘Wouldn’t it be neat?’” she told the Post. “A lot of people do crazy things like sitting on a flagpole for three days. I just kept on. It was just me and the lady in Utah. So finally, I said, ‘I’m going to do this.’”
To Michael Kurth, who joined the bass section in 1994, Jane’s accomplishment was less inspirational than mythical. Kurth tells us, “You’d have to be really ambitious to be inspired, because it was such an unattainable record. To spend that many years on the job, it’s almost inconceivable. She was certainly a great musician. Nobody can stand in that job for long unless they have real intuitive and innate musicality. And her technique was amazing. Her hands were so flexible. I would sit behind her, and her thumb would bend in angles that I didn’t think human thumbs could bend.”
Jane and her double bass were onstage on the afternoon of Sunday, May 15, 2016, for an Atlanta Symphony pops concert. Broadway’s Golden Age was a great, rousing show. For an encore, the program called for a tune from Irving Berlin’s classic musical Annie Get Your Gun.
The players were about thirty seconds from the final measures of the encore number when Jane stopped playing. Michael Kurth was playing bass right beside her, sharing her music stand. “There were maybe ten measures left in the last piece of the last program of the year,” he says. “And I suddenly saw, out of the corner of my eye, her falling. Her bass teetered over and crashed into my bass—there’s still a gouge in my bass from it. And she just collapsed over, unresponsive.”
Kurth and tuba player Michael Moore (a mere forty-nine-year veteran of the orchestra) carried the tiny double bassist off the stage while the rest of the orchestra went on with the show and completed the number. A physician who was a member of the chorus and a nurse from the audience worked to revive her, but Jane Little never regained consciousness.
After the paramedics took Jane away, Michael Kurth joined most of the orchestra backstage behind the bass section. There were tears and hugs. “We weren’t calculating and assessing the momentousness of the occasion. We were just reacting and trying to—I mean, it’s our Jane. We all loved Jane,” he says.
That night, Kurth told the Washington Post, “She seemed to be made of bass resin and barbed wire. She was unstoppable. I honestly thought I was going to retire before she did.”
The Atlanta Symphony Orchestra announced on Facebook that it would dedicate the following weekend’s performances to the late Jane Little. One commenter on the site said she was “still shakened” after witnessing her collapse but added, “RIP dear lady; you are an inspiration!” Another called that final concert at Atlanta Symphony Hall “harrowing” but added that Jane Little died “doing what she loved.” “What an amazing way to go,” orchestra fan Amanda Turner wrote.
Senior orchestra manager Russell Williamson marveled at the timing. “For her to go out at the end of a concert, the golden age of Broadway, and it was during the encore!” he told the Post.
Michael Kurth points out that “when she played her last note, she was doing what she loved, surrounded by people she loved, in a place that was like home to her.
“It was a pretty spectacular exit, frankly,” he says, “for a really spectacular lady. I mean, you really couldn’t write a better Hollywood ending.”
Had the actual ending been scripted by a Hollywood screenwriter, reviewers would say it was too obvious. The song that Jane Little was performing when she collapsed to the stage was “There’s No Business Like Show Business.”