Researching Jack Sharpe

Sharpe began playing tenor sax at age eighteen. He played with Vic Lewis and Teddy Foster in the early 1950s and freelanced in the London area. He worked as a taxi driver in 1953, played with Dizzy Reece in 1954, then in Tubby Hayes's band in 1955–56. He played with Mike Senn in the Downbeaters after 1957, worked further with Hayes, and led his own sextet in 1958. Additionally, he found work promoting and booking other musicians.

In the early 1970s Sharpe managed a night club where he led the house band on week ends. Around 1975, he left music intermittently to drive a cab. He returned to jazz in 1985, playing with Alan Branscombe and leading a Tubby Hayes tribute band.

Sharpe was born in Berkeley, California, United States, the first of two children of John Rufus Sharpe Jr. and Regina Franvell Walshe. Although his father was not known to be musically inclined, that was not the case with his mother. She achieved some local renown for her operatic singing and she passed her love of music to her son. Sharpe was distantly related to the singer and entertainer Judy Canova.

"So Rare" was a #2 hit in 1957 for Jimmy Dorsey, but it has been recorded by numerous artists including Carl Ravell and his Orchestra (1937), Gus Arnheim and his Coconut Grove Orchestra (1937), Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians (1937), Andy Williams (1959), Ella Fitzgerald (1960) and Ray Conniff (1965). Sharpe and Herst have four collaborations listed at the performing rights organisation ASCAP, including "So Rare", and a number of other Herst-Sharpe songs are listed at the US Copyright Office.

Sharpe wrote the lyrics to "The Dream Peddler's Serenade" (1950), composed by Johnny Mercer and recorded by Margaret Whiting.

He authored at least one novel, Hogar, Lord of the Asyr (1987), published in New American Library's Signet imprint under his full name of John Rufus Sharpe III.

In the mid-1960s, Sharpe formed Rondo Music, and by 1967 he was General Manager of the George E. Primrose Music Co, Mill Valley, California. In 1970 he married Josephine Tumminia, an opera singer who had recorded with the Jimmy Dorsey Orchestra in 1937. At the time of his death he had last resided in San Mateo, California, but he died in Santa Cruz County.