In a case of delayed but realized expectations, Eddy Hanson did not become known as a ragtime composer until 35 years after his first real rag. In the interim, he did pretty well for himself and cut a nice-sized swath through the Midwest via the airwaves. He was born Ethwell Hanson to August Hanson and Henrietta May Jones in New London, Wisconsin, right around the time that the 1893 Chicago Exposition was featuring some of the first ragtime heard publicly. August was a mechanical engineer whose family had immigrated from Denmark when he was eight years old, and Henrietta was a Wisconsin native. Over the next few years Ethwell would gain three sisters and brother, Nioleta May (3/15/1897), Arleen V. (2/1899), Charlotte Agnes (8/21/1906) and Loyal McKinley (9/10/1901) respectively. At an early age the boy became entranced with the music that spewed forth from a neighbor's Edison Amberola, and after listening to a selection or two would run home and try to emulate the rhythms on pots and pans. It was obvious that a piano would help keep the kitchen ware in better working order, so one was obtained. August had some good sense of music, perhaps even some training from his youth, and was insistent that Ethwell learn the elements of proper rhythm and harmony, plus the exacting discipline to play cleanly. The family appeared in the 1900 enumeration in Farmington, Wisconsin, with August listed as a stationery engineer.

When Ethwell was eight, August arranged for a year of piano lessons for his son, paying 50 cents per week. He admitted later that he was a poor student, too busy composing his own music on the side to bother with the music the teacher was giving him. However, he kept at it even after the lessons ended. Obviously interested in playing the latest possible music, Eddy, as he preferred to be called, started learning rags and two steps. At twelve he was playing two steps and waltzes with a local orchestra in Farmington. He also found another love around this time, the organ. Eddy was fascinated with the workings of these multi-keyboard instruments and the number of sounds that could be coaxed from them. Even as a very talented and competent pianist, he would eventually be cherished for his work on theater organs. In the school band Eddy also took up the saxophone, which he would become quite adept at.

Two years after his youngest sister was born, Eddy's mother Henrietta died in October of 1908. By early 1910 August had remarried to Katherine M. Hanson, who was only five years older than Eddy. In the 1910 census the reconfigured family was still residing in Farmington with August as an engineer in the Wisconsin Veteran's Home. (The couple would divorce in the mid-1910s.) Eddy was attending Waupaca High School and was listed as a member of the high school paper, The Criterian. He also played more frequently at local dances, and was starting to perform for movies as well in local theaters several nights a week. Late in the year the family moved to Neenah, Wisconsin where they spent the next few years, then to Waupaca around 1915. Still composing, Eddy managed to get a song in print at age 17, and another one the following year. The second composition was the Home Coming Song, written for his senior class. Following high school he continued to play both piano and organ at various functions, most often in the Waupaca area movie houses. Hanson continued his education at the American Conservatory with Frank Van Dusen, and at Lawrence College (now Lawrence University) with Mason Slade. However, Eddy took on other work as well, perhaps to support his schooling. On his 1917 draft card, he showed to be self-employed and his occupation as [looks like] farming for the town of Waupaca. (August Hanson also appeared as a farmer in the 1920 census in Waupaca.) But 1917 would be a breakout year for the 24-year-old composer.

Hanson had his first major publication with Rattlesnake Rag in song format through Forster Music Publishers in Chicago. He had also completed a piano rag version of the piece which currently resides as a manuscript in the University of Wisconsin in Madison, but it is unclear whether this instrumental was actually published at that time. Some version of it must have been in print since it ended up on a medley O-type roll before the year was out. In addition, Eddy's input was useful in the invention of the Bartola, a compact theater organ designed to fit in a theater pit. The keyboards and pedal board were integrated within the access area of a piano, allowing a smaller footprint while accommodating many ranks of pipes and percussion, using newer electronic solenoids instead of the traditional pneumatics. It was produced by the newly formed Bartola Musical Instrument Company in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, founded by Dan Barton. The firm was later reformed into the Barton Organ Company, with Eddy playing their instruments off and on for many years.

Eddy's talents accompanying movies got him a plum gig in the Navy, where he spent the remainder of World War One. He toured the country the help promote the sale of war bonds, but this time he was accompanying the actual stars of the movies, including Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford. His saxophone playing was also noted, and late in the war Eddy was picked to be a saxophone soloist in one of the premiere 100 member bands of the veteran band master John Philip Sousa. The band toured the United States and Europe following the war, including some keyboard performances for British royalty. After his tour of duty with the Navy and the Sousa band were up, Hanson continued his music education in Chicago in 1919 at the Chicago College of Music, taking courses from Clarence Eddy among others. At some point he studied composition privately with the noted instructor Adolph Weidig. Chicago would become Eddy's home base for the next few decades, but he still stayed connected with Waupaca.

Hanson's next break came in 1920. According to an article in the New York Clipper on March 31, Eddy was one of five hundred applicants picked in a search for a new song writing talent held by the Riviera Music Company in Chicago. The first piece of his they published became a bona-fide hit, even if it was typical of the fare at that time. Titled Desertland: An Oriental Fox Trot, it established him as a Chicago song writer. His contract assured that Riviera would publish at least four pieces a year from Hanson's pen, which they did for at least the first two years. Later in the year Eddy was a guest back in Waupaca for the opening of the grand $100,000 Palace Opera House on October 6, 1920. According to the Waupaca newspaper, "The music was furnished by a Waupaca orchestra, including Ethwell Hanson, who presided at the pipe organ, one of the best that may be obtained... Too much can not be said in praise of the music by the local orchestra and by Ethwell Hanson on the grand pipe organ." To top that off, he became the manager of the composing staff of Riviera.

While working his way through his extended education course, Hanson became very adept at the pipe organ, of which there were many beautiful and varied examples in 1920s Chicago. A new child of the now viable entertainment industry emerged at this same time, and looking for content, they turned to Eddy for everything from popular ragtime tunes to poignant ballads. As it turns out, pipe organs registered very well on early microphones, so in 1923 the theory that this would draw in listeners was put to the test on one of the earliest radio stations in the country. Thus Eddy Hanson launched his career as a radio organist on station clear channel WDAP (now WGN) in Chicago. He achieved new notoriety, even though at that time most radios consisted of crystal sets, and few had speakers. New stations started popping up like Iowa popcorn, and Eddy was also invited to play on WBBM and WLS. He found a long term home in 1924 on WCFL, an NBC affiliate, working there on and off from 1924 through 1948. That same year he wrote what would become a great radio hit for cowboy singer Gene Autry. At the End of the Sunset Trail, composed on a poetic passage by Ralph Waldo Emerson, was a best seller on both records and in sheet music, and spread the name of Eddy Hanson across the country. But this was only part time work in the beginning, as Chicago movie goers still wanted accompaniments to the otherwise silent movies.

In 1925 the famous organist Jess Crawford was lured to the center of film production to play for the movie palaces in Los Angeles. Organs run on compressed air and abhor a vacuum, so Hanson readily stepped in to continue where Crawford left off. For the next three years he reigned at both the Uptown Theater and Tivoli Theater in Chicago for both films and live shows. On the side he was working as an arranger for publisher Harold Rossiter in Chicago, with many credited arrangements in his name. Then Al Jolson and the "talkies" came along to spoil things for theater musicians all over the country. As for Eddy, he simply put his energies back into radio, being very much in demand for his talents throughout the Midwest. In 1930 he adopted a recent song composed by Otto Harbach, Oscar Hammerstein II and Herbert Stothart for his own them. If A Wish Could Make It So was frequently heard at the beginning of his fifteen to thirty minute broadcasts. During his years on the air he accompanied such stars as Gene Autry, Grace Wilson, Lulu Belle and Scotty, Kate Smith, Red Skelton and megaphone crooner Rudy Vallee. He also was the first organist to play the Amos 'n Andy Theme Song, Perfect Song, on the radio, and provided theme and background music at times for Myrt and Marge, Helen Trent and the wildly popular Fibber McGee and Molly. Eddy was quoted as saying, "I worked on them five hours each day, and sometimes had four 15-minute programs a day dedicated to organ music."

From late 1924 to 1927, Eddy also did some piano roll recordings for the Capitol Roll label (not affiliated with Capitol Records which was founded in 1942), most of which were re-released a few years later under the Sears and Roebuck Supertone label. These performances helped to reestablish his skills as a pianist and arranger as well, and some can still be heard via YouTube videos with a little searching. He is said to have also recorded 88-note rolls for QRS, U.S. Rolls, and Imperial, although some of these may also be re-releases of the Capitol sessions.

Other than those lasting examples of his early performances, Hanson was so busy with radio that he did little recording to disc. It should be considered that early electronic recording was not entirely up to the demands of the massive theater pipe organs with forty or more ranks of timbres and percussion instruments.

Eddy Hanson seated at a magnificent four manual theater organ.

With less work available at the movies, Eddy branched out into supper clubs, often seen playing the piano with one hand and the organ with the other, using the organ pedals as well. Many remember his personality as being quite "dapper and colorful," and his general demeanor as very engaging. As for his own attitude, he wrote in his later years, "I never count the years or talk about death or disease. I never have had a headache in my entire life - can eat anything, drink anything, any time of the day, and sleep nine or ten hours a night. `As a man thinketh so he is.' I'm the healthiest man in the world!" Even with all that sleep he was busy. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Midwest listings are found for Eddy's shows on the new medium of television. In addition to that, the 1950 census taken in Chicago showed him working as a professional organist in a cocktail lounge. It also confirmed his status as having never been married.

The 1950s also bore some healthy fruit for Hanson. At the beginning of the decade he joined ASCAP. Then in 1951 Eddy composed The Wisconsin Waltz. While quickly taken up by his home state, it took fifty years for them to officially adopt it as the state waltz in 2001. The piece achieved a fond notoriety in the interim. Then in 1952, one of Eddie's musical peers, Capitol Records A&R man Lou Busch, who had been recording for two years as Joe "Fingers" Carr, approached Eddy about reconfiguring his Rattlesnake Rag for a Honky-Tonk piano recording. The arrangement was strong enough to earn a co-composing credit for Busch, and the single containing Rattlesnake Rag became instant popular fodder for jukeboxes all around the country. Busch's arrangement was also released in sheet music form, racking up fairly decent sales considering the dated genre it represented. Eddy even played it again from time to time in his live performances. Rattlesnake Rag enjoyed another short surge when the 1917 piano roll version was featured in a party scene in the movie Reds under the direction of star Warren Beatty.

After spending much of the 1950s in a variety of performance venues in Chicago and Midwest, Hanson retired to Waupaca in the early 1960s, playing locally on and off throughout the 1960s, and recording a few albums on Rollo Records based in Appleton, Wisconsin and run by his friend Al Rollow. Eddy also performed and recorded with Appleton bandleader Lawrence Duchow. Around 1969 he started his own record label, Kobar, and set forth on a series of vinyl discs featuring his performances of old and new favorites on majestic theater pipe organs. Hanson was also seen performing weekend evenings as Simpson's Supper Club in Waupaca. In his role as master organist he became master teacher as well, taking on advanced students for lessons. In the 1970s he was regarded as the oldest master organist still alive, and still active giving concerts and seminars on organ performance. After another decade of successes and accolades, Eddy was honored as a special member of 1980 AMICA (Automatic Musical Instrument Collector's Association) for his earlier piano roll work.

In April of 1984 Eddy moved into the Wisconsin Veteran's Home in King, Wisconsin, the very organization for which his father had worked more than 70 years earlier. The master organist died there at the age of 92 in 1986. He was fondly remembered by many from the Midwest at the services that followed. Hanson was buried in the Lakeside Memorial Cemetery in his beloved Waupaca, marking the end of an era of popular organists.