Melvin Whitfield Carter Sr., a lifelong St. Paul resident and jazz musician who played with music legends, died Wednesday of heart failure at the age of 93.

“Music brought him strength like spinach brought Popeye strength,” said his son Melvin Carter Jr. “Music was his mistress. My mother always said she couldn’t compete against music.”

Carter was born on Sept. 8, 1923, in St. Paul, to Mym and Mary Carter who moved to town from Paris, Texas, in 1918, after a fire destroyed their home. Mym Carter was a musician who could play any instrument and toured with several circus bands.

The Carter family lived on Rondo Avenue and Mym worked various jobs and taught music lessons to interested neighbors. A priest from St. Peter Claver Catholic Church encouraged Mym to start a band with local youth and rounded up donated instruments to help get it going.

That band included Melvin, who talked about the experience during a 2003 oral history interview conducted for the Minnesota Historical Society: “One day (my father) came home with a truckload of used instruments all bent out of shape and everything. He worked on them for weeks till he got them all polished up and repaired. And he started this band. I think I was about in seventh grade. We became the toast of the neighborhood.”

Carter and the band performed at church events, parades and community events. Sometimes they’d just march up and down Rondo Avenue playing for the neighborhood. In the early ’40s, teenage band members started getting drafted to fight in World War II, leading Carter to get himself “drafted by my own request.”

As he explained in 2003: “Guys that I used to play music with (and) would run the streets with, they all started disappearing from 1940 to 1943. And pretty soon there was nobody to hang out with. All the guys were going. And they’d come back and talk about what units they were in, what they were doing. So I just said, ‘Well, hell, I’m not going to stay here.’ I called up the draft department. A month later they sent me a letter. Boy, that’s really youth for you. That is really youth.”

Carter Sr. served in the U.S. Navy from 1943 to 1946 and played trumpet in military and party bands. “He played for at least three presidents, including Franklin D. Roosevelt and Dwight D. Eisenhower,” said Carter Jr. “In more recent years, he played for Barack Obama, who was a senator at the time, at a fundraiser.”

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Trump returns to Minnesota for Wednesday event at Duluth airport While stationed in California, Carter met his future wife, Billie Dove Harris. After he was discharged, the couple moved back to Rondo Avenue and started a family: Teresina (born in 1946), Melvin Jr. (1948), Paris (1952), Mark (1953), Matthew (1955) and Laurence (1962).

By day, Carter worked for the railroad industry, while he spent his nights and weekends playing area clubs and events. In that era, it was common for jazz musicians to tour with their own rhythm section and hire horn players in each city. Carter ended up sharing the stage with many of the genre’s biggest names, including Dizzy Gillespie, John Coltrane, Sarah Vaughan and Miles Davis.

“Some of them tried to (hire him) and take my father on the road, but he never dwelled on any such thing at all,” Carter Jr. said.

Not that Carter bragged about it. “He said what he meant, he meant what he said, that was his mantra,” his son said. “You never make excuses, that was his thing. And he never complained about anything. He was incredibly practical. Like Spock on ‘Star Trek’ was logical, my father was practical. I never saw him do anything that was ridiculous, ever, even out of anger. He never lost his cool out of anger. He was as nurturing, caring and considerate of a human being as you could possibly be.”

In 1962, Carter took a job as a janitor for the St. Paul schools and spent his next 27 years working his way up to an engineer position. As he did earlier in his life, he spent his free time playing music. When interest in jazz and big band started to wane in the ’60s, Carter taught himself the Hammond organ and spent a decade playing in a band at the Town and Country Club.

Carter retired in 1989, and his wife died in 2000, but he never stopped performing. “I just bought myself a brand new piano as a retirement present after my wife died,” he said in 2003. “I needed something not (to) take her place, (but to) take up some time.”

Carter lived his final years at Episcopal Homes’ Cornelia House, where he sometimes performed gospel and jazz music joined by his family members. Carter Jr. served on the St. Paul Police Department from 1975 until his retirement in 2003, and his son Melvin Carter III is running in St. Paul’s mayoral race.

“Even after his health started to deteriorate, he’d always say ‘Get my horn, bring it here,’ ” said Carter Jr. “He still had a few hot licks left in him. He tried to play it a couple of days before he died.

“He was not flamboyant, he never boasted. He let his best, and his word, speak for him.”

Funeral services are set for Tuesday at St. Peter Claver Catholic Church, 375 Oxford St. N. Visitation is at 11 a.m. followed by a service at noon.