Well, this is how it all got started!
My dad was a huge music lover, so there was always music playing in our house. He took me everywhere he went, including clubs, festival & joints, so I have been listening to and experiencing music since I was a baby. Thanks dad for having such great taste in music!
Cootie Stark:
Cootie Stark (1926-2005) was the King of the Piedmont blues. He learned his songs at the feet of the originators of Piedmont Blues: Baby Tate, Pink Anderson, Walter Phelps, Peg Leg Sam and Blind Sammy Doolie. Cootie Stark has a repertoire of 100's of Blues and Gospel songs, making him one of the last direct links to a South long gone.
Cootie Stark was born as Johnny Miller on December 9, 1926, in Abbeville, SC. He received his first guitar when he was 14 years old. While still a teenager, Stark moved to nearby Greenville, SC, where, unable to find work because of extremely poor eyesight (he eventually went blind), he began singing and playing guitar on the street corners in the late '30s, learning the busking trade (and a large repertoire of songs)acquiring the nickname "Sugar Man." He wasn't discovered by the outside world until he was in his seventies, when Music Maker Foundation founder Tim Duffy happened to hear Stark perform some Fats Domino songs.
Music Maker released his first album, Sugar Man, in 1999, and a second release, Raw Sugar, which featured accompaniment by Taj Mahal, followed in 2003.
Cootie Stark passed away from prostate cancer on April 14th, 2005.
This video is Cootie talking about his surprise 78th birthday party. The day of, I told him that we were going to someones party with one of his best friends (Eddie Tigner). All Cootie wanted to know was if he could smoke cigars at this party. That night while he was upstairs in my house getting ready for us to go out, all of his friends were sneaking in downstairs to surprise him!
Cootie Speaks
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Sam Myers:
Sam Myers (1936–2006)was born in Laurel, Mississippi. Myers appeared as an accompanist on dozens of recordings for blues artists over the past five decades, and fronted one of the top blues bands in the world. He began his career as a drummer for legendary bands, but was most famous as a blues vocalist and blues harp player. Myers was in high demand for his authentic delta blues sound. For nearly two decades he was the featured vocalist for Anson Funderburgh & The Rockets.
Sam acquired an interest in music while a schoolboy in Jackson, Mississippi and became skilled enough at playing the trumpet and drums that he received a non-degree scholarship from the American Conservatory School of Music in Chicago. Myers attended school by day and at night frequented the nightclubs of the South Side of Chicago, meeting and sitting in with Jimmy Rogers, Muddy Waters, Howling Wolf, Little Walter, Hound Dog Taylor, Robert "Junior" Lockwood, and Elmore James. Myers played drums with Elmore James on a fairly steady basis from 1952 until James's death in 1963, and is credited on many of James's historic recordings for Chess Records. In 1956, Myers wrote and recorded what was to be his most famous single, “Sleeping In The Groundâ€, a song that has been covered by Eric Clapton, Robert Cray, and many other blues artists.
From the early 1960s until 1986, Myers worked the clubs in and around Jackson as well as across the South in the Chitlin' Circuit. He even found himself touring the world with Sylvia Embrey and the Mississippi All-Stars Blues Band. Then in 1986, Sam met Anson Funderburgh, from Plano, Texas, and joined Anson’s band, The Rockets. That partnership has endured to this day. Myers has toured all over the U.S.A. and the world with The Rockets.
Sam Myers passed away from lung cancer on July 17, 2006, age 70.
Sam Myers
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