In her 1998 biography of the white American jazz pianist and bandleader Billy Tipton (1914-89), Suits Me: The Double Life of Billy Tipton, Diane Wood Middlebrook offers a regretful authorial aside in the course of her reconstruction of Tipton's life and times: ‘Too bad for us that, unlike some of the male impersonators we know about, Billy did not write a memoir or leave a letter marked with the instruction “To be opened after my death.”’ Tipton was a successful professional entertainer and musical agent, as well as a husband and father to four sons, whose death attracted national attention when the fact of his female-sexed body was made public knowledge by the press. Middlebrook's fantasy of a deathbed disclosure reveals an assumption that there is a secret which needs to be revealed and betrays a conviction that Tipton's gender identity is a mystery requiring resolution. In the absence of such a document the author draws her own conclusions, with the reference to Tipton as a ‘male impersonator’ anticipating the emphasis on theatrical performance which will characterise her biographical standpoint. By contrast, Jackie Kay's 1998 novel Trumpet - inspired by the life of Billy Tipton and published in the same year as Middlebrook's biography - does incorporate the discovery of a letter inscribed ‘To be opened after my death', written by the deceased jazz trumpeter Joss Moody and addressed to his son Colman. The contents of the letter are not disclosed until the penultimate chapter - entitled 'Last Word’ - which is one of only two chapters in the novel which represent Joss's narrative perspective. However, the reader who shares Middlebrook's curiosity, anticipating dramatic and possibly intimate revelations, is likely to be disappointed. Joss's letter to his son does contain personal reflections on identity, but these reflections pertain not to his sex, gender or sexuality but to his identity as a Scottish man of African heritage. It tells a story - or rather stories - of origins, but these origins extend to his own father and beyond, situating his life within a collective history of migration and mobility, both forced and elective. Natal birth is no more the definitive origin of Joss's sex or gender than it is of his identity as a black man and a Scot.