John Henry Creach had a long and strange career. Born in 1917, the year America entered WWI, he played as a blues and jazz musician throughout the 30s and 40s. Unusually, for a black musician at the time, he also played in symphony orchestras. Moving to Los Angeles in 1945, he appeared in films alongside Nat King Cole. By the mid-1960s, his career was largely forgotten, but he met and made friends with drummer Joey Covington in 1967, and when Covington joined Jefferson Airplane, he brought Papa John Creach with him. Creach also joined the related band Hot Tuna, and played with them until the middle of the 1970s, when he joined Jefferson Starship. He stayed on good terms with them all, and played with various members of the Jefferson Starship family for the rest of his life, until dying in 1994 at the age of 76. The Cat and the Fiddle was Creach's sixth solo album, and was his first with DJM records.