Her accent, the food she cooked, and, most profoundly for young Thelonious, the churches she attended with the family in New York were steeped in southern culture.” In May of 1970, Thelonious Monk made one of his rare return visits, traveling with his wife Nellie to Raleigh for a series of performances at the Frog & the Nightgown jazz club, Stephenson reports. Monk’s mother, Barbara Batts Monk, writes Stephenson, “was a North Carolinian through and through. Jazz scholar Sam Stephenson, in the Oxford American Magazine (2007), writes of how, even in the family’s Manhattan apartment, the culture of North Carolina and the South was ever present. However, the Monks were part of the Great Migration of African Americans who left the South and settled by the thousands in the more-industrialized, less-segregated Northern cities. One might imagine that because he left North Carolina at such a young age, he would have grown up with very little cultural connection to the state of his birth.
The middle child, Thelonious Monk, was four years old when they moved. In 1922, a young family with three children left Rocky Mount to begin a new life in New York.
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