Since my youth I have enjoyed playing occasional practical jokes…  Two of the wildest involved albums of jazz piano music I recorded under fictitious names: Buck Hammer was supposedly a shy, black boogie-woogie pioneer whose album was released posthumously, and Mary Anne Jackson was, according to the liner notes, a black pianist and composer who performed with 'bold authority,' mainly in Europe.  […] I not only did the piano playing on both albums but wrote the liner notes, in the deliberately stuffy, overly analytical style of some critics.

'Hammer’s death was a tragic loss to the world of jazz,' wrote a New York Herald Tribune critic.  The experts, Allen later observed, liked his playing much better when they thought he was black and dead rather than white and alive.