Jerre Cammack is hardly a household name, even in households where early 20th century music is very much in vogue. However, in the Midwest United States he was a staple for many years, albeit well after the roar of ragtime had subsided substantially. He was born in or near Marion, Indiana in 1890 as Jeremiah Cammack, the oldest child of William T. Cammack and Emlin Margarte "Emma" Cox, the other one being his sister Hazel Emlin (3/4/1893). The 1900 enumeration taken in Center, Indiana, showed William to be a clerk for Grant County. Following that period into the 1910s there is a decided dearth of city directory listings as well as any presence in the 1910 census, so Jeremiah's movements were hard to track. However, by 1913 he was well-ensconced in Saint Louis, Missouri, where he would be based for the rest of his life.

Saint Louis directories from 1913 forward showed Jeremiah's occupation simply as "music" without any further detail, meaning he was most likely a working musician playing in clubs and theaters. His work in some of the theaters about town likely provided him with opportunities, some by necessity, to learn and play the organ. The 1916 directory showed that Jerre, a variation he used frequently, was residing with his widowed father and sister Hazel. That same year he was married to Miss Mary Ann Hemmen, who was approaching the age of 18 at the time.

It is a matter of opinion to some degree as to when Jerre's first known ragtime work was actually composed. On a copy given to ragtime historian and musician Trebor Jay Tichenor, Jerre personally inscribed on the cover that his Tom and Jerry Rag was originally created in 1906 in Marion, when he would have been 16-years-old. On a recording he puts it at 1907. There are facets of the rag that clearly sound more advanced than a piece from that time, which may simply have been a matter of how it was arranged. The "Tom" component was his drummer friend Thomas Pickerell (misspelled as Tom Pickeral on the sheet), "Some Drummer" as the title page stated. The title was a play on the British term for youngsters engaging in juvenile behavior, and was also the name of a British cocktail by that time, but also of their names. That by the mid-1910s, Pickerell was a practicing prosecuting attorney in Marion gives some credence to the possible 1906 origin of the work.

Cammack first had Tom and Jerry Rag published in 1913 by the Saint Louis Publishing Company, which was possibly his own imprint. That same year, this time under the label of Jerry Cammack, he issued the verbosely-titled son You Can Paddle and Paddle In Your Own Canoe, Cause I've Got Me An Airship Now, composed by Jack Pittman. Nothing definitive was found on Pittman, and no other songs by him were located. However, it appears that Tom and Jerry had also co-composed the waltz ballad Eyes of Fortune around the same time. Evidently Cammack was trying to gain some traction in the business, as on the back cover of the Airship piece he put the following notice which had some optimistic but likely overstated verbiage:

In the end, it is difficult to find anything more with Cammack's imprint than a couple of copies of the Airship song, so the business likely went bust in a hurry. In 1917, Jerre's rag was issued again, this time by John Stark Publishing, to which Cammack had sold the plates. This was followed up by Rag La Joie, which was released by Stark in 1918, using recycled cover art. It is immediately more advanced in construction than Tom and Jerry, but it had an uphill climb, coming out before the end of the war and during a period when jazz was overspreading the nation. While Stark Publishing did the best they could to remain relevant, they had a shallower pool of resources or clout than the major New York and Chicago publishers, evidenced by reuse of covers and more crowded two-page scores, perhaps giving Cammack little motivation to continue composing in the genre, if at all.

For his 1917 draft record, Cammack claimed he had eyesight issues, and they appear to have kept him from the war. The 1920 enumeration showed Jeremiah working as a musician, and the city directory pinpointed that to the Columbia Theater on Gravois Avenue. He needed to work to feed his growing family, which included Nola Emlin (10/18/1918), William Ward (12/23/1919) and Bayard August (1/18/1925). While Jerre, now using Jerry more often, continued to play for the cinemas into the mid-1920s, he also had some interest in the growing medium of radio broadcasting. By the late 1920s he was a staff musician for station WIL in Saint Louis, one of the only stations on the west side of the Mississippi River to have a W designation. They were also, according to an early 1930s advertisement, the first commercial station on air in Saint Louis, and the first to have their own news-gathering organization. But all-news stations were still far in the future, and with the Great Depression bearing down on mid-America, entertainment was as essential as information.

Advertisements from the late 1920s, when WIL was still a shared low-powered frequency at 1200 khz on the dial, Jerre was shown increasingly active playing as an accompanist for singers on the air, and even doing some recitals. He even helped to design their new studio to help optimize it for musical broadcasting. In 1930 after WIL obtained a bit more broadcasting power, he had his own show, Around the Organ with Jerry Cammack. The 1930 census showed that he was still working as a theater musician as well, but by this time likely not for films, which had recently gained soundtracks. There were also some appearances with the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra and local high schools. Jerre's mid-1930s show on WIL was called Memories in Melody, and was performing as many as four shows per day. Jerry spent much of the 1930s playing not only on the radio but for public events around the Midwest, such as state fairs and openings of buildings, plus the occasional concert. But even that could be slim pickings by late in the decade, so he also took up teaching private lessons in his home, as noted in the 1940 census and his 1942 draft record. According to a mention in Radio Daily, his focus was at that time on the accordion.

It is hard to trace specific time periods for his 1940s and 1950s activities, but Cammack spent some time providing music for the radio version of Truth or Consequences in the late 1940s, during a period when musicians still had some leverage and pre-recorded music was being discouraged. He was mentioned as having played Hammond organs. He also spent more time out west, playing often in Arizona and New Mexico, as well as California. For a while 1955, according to Billboard, Jerre played the calliope for the Disney Circus, which had a brief stint at the recently opened Disneyland Park in Anaheim, California. He also had his own orchestra in the mid-1950s that featured Frank "Pancho" Roche on the drums. By 1958 Roche had taken over the group, and Jerre, who was deteriorating due to complications from diabetes, would soon curtail his activities, spending most of his final years in Saint Louis.

It was near Saint Louis that Trebor Tichenor, who was trying to find every living writer of ragtime he possibly could, encountered Cammack in the summer of 1961, likely at one of the frequent ragtime get-togethers just across the Mississippi River in Collinsville, Illinois, at the home of Harold and Thelma Doerrs. This demonstrates that Cammack was still as active as he could be in the growing ragtime scene. Having also met pianists Charles Thompson, Knocky Parker and Bob Wright there, Trebor obtained a copy of Cammack's first rag, one of many fine rarities in his collection that would later find its way into the folio literally named Ragtime Rarities in 1975. Eighteen months after Trebor's encounter, Jeremiah Cammack died at age 72 in a Saint Louis hospital from arteriosclerosis caused in part by diabetes, which according to the death certificate had been plaguing him for more than a decade. He was interred at Sunset Burial Park. Mary survived him until 1974, and is resting alongside her musical husband.