Mehegan played solo piano for many years at the Composer's Lounge, Ambassador Grill and Lounge and the Drake Room in New York City, as well as the River Cafe in Brooklyn, NY. He was the jazz critic for the New York Herald Tribune. He later held posts at the Juilliard School of Music and Yale University.
Also during the 1950s Mehegan was a regular attendee at the Tanglewood Music Festival in Massachusetts. Mehegan also had a run-in with the House Un-American Activities Committee where he was an uncooperative witness and this had a negative effect on his career, limiting some career possibilities for about a decade. In the early 1950s he played a honky-tonk saloon piano player on The Gabby Hayes Show television series. He wrote the incidental music for A Streetcar Named Desire which he performed on Broadway for two years. In 1946, he was appointed head of the jazz department at the Metropolitan Music School in New York. He had the opportunity to play at the legendary Marie's Crisis bohemian club in Greenwich Village.
In 1941 he arrived in Manhattan where he lived with his first wife, Doris and their two children Carey and Gretchen. His mother gave him violin lessons, but he preferred piano. He taught himself to play by matching his fingers to the notes played on a neighborhood player piano. Mehegan was born in Wethersfield, Connecticut, and began playing the piano at the age of five. John Mehegan (J– April 3, 1984) was an American jazz pianist, lecturer and critic.
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