After 71 years with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, Jane Little gave her final performance on Sunday, dying at the end of a performance of the song "There's No Business Like Show Business." She was 87.
Little held the record for longest professional tenure with one symphony. She made her debut as a bassist with the Atlanta Youth Symphony Orchestra (later the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra) at the age of 16 on Feb. 4, 1945. Little told Atlanta Magazine she wanted to become a ballerina, but her feet "just weren't right," and after scoring high on a musical aptitude test in high school, was urged to become a bassist. "Within a month, I was hooked," she said. "I loved it. It was awfully difficult to push those heavy strings down, and to carry the instrument around, but I just loved it."
When she learned about Frances Darger's record with the Utah Symphony — retiring in 2012 after 70 years — Little decided she wanted to break it, The Washington Post reports, and she did so in February. After hitting that milestone, she said she planned to retire at the end of the season, wanting to spend time at her house in North Carolina. Little had been undergoing chemotherapy for multiple myeloma, and she told friends she had been feeling a bit under the weather. When she collapsed onstage, orchestra members carried her backstage, and she never regained consciousness. "Hollywood could not have scripted it better," Paul Murphy, orchestra's associate principal viola, told The Post. Her husband, Warren Little, died in 2002. Catherine Garcia
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