January 29, 2004 – Soko Richardson was born on December 8, 1939 in New Iberia, Louisiana.
Richardson began his musical career at the age of 16, when he left home to tour the South with local bands. Shortly thereafter Ike Turner, upon hearing Richardson play in Texas, hired him to play with his band, Kings of Rhythm, and then later with The Ike & Tina Turner Revue.
Richardson worked with Turner for the next ten years. In March 1971 Richardson’s arrangement of the John Fogerty song, “Proud Mary” reached number four on the pop charts, and number five on the R&B charts. The song became a signature song for Tina Turner, and won the band a Grammy for “Best R&B Vocal Performance By A Group.”
November 19, 2003 – Greg Ridley was born October 23, 1947 played bass with Spooky Tooth and Humble Pie. Born in Carlisle in 1947, Greg Ridley joined his first group in the early Sixties. He was Dino in a short-lived outfit called Dino and the Danubes before teaming up 
November 17, 2003 – Arthur Conley was born on January 4, 1946 in McIntosh County, Georgia and grew up in Atlanta. He first recorded as a 13 year old in 1959 as the lead singer of Arthur & the Corvets. With this group, he released three singles in 1963 and 1964, “Poor Girl”, “I Believe”, and “Flossie Mae”.
November 5, 2003 – Bobby Lee Hatfield was born on August 10, 1940 in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin, and moved with his family to Anaheim, California when he was four. A 1958 graduate of Anaheim High School, where he had sung in the school choir.
August 18, 2003 –Anthony Paul Tony Jackson (the Searchers) was born in Dingle, Liverpool on July 16th 1938. After leaving high school he went to Walton Technical College to train as an electrician. Jackson was inspired by the skiffle sound of Lonnie Donegan, and then by Buddy Holly and other U.S. rock and rollers. He founded the skiffle group the Martinis.
July 30, 2003 – Samuel Cornelius “Sam” Phillips was born on January 5, 1923 in Florence, Alabama and a graduate of Coffee High School. As a youngster he was intensely exposed to blues and became interested in music by African workers on his father’s cotton farm.
July 25, 2003 – Erik Brann or Braunn was born Rick Davis on August 11th 1950 in Boston, Massachusetts. At 6 while being a resident in Boston, Massachusetts, Erik was accepted as a child into the prodigy program for violin at the Boston Symphony Orchestra. By age 7 he was performing in concerts as violinist. In his early teens he moved to guitar and California with his parents. Starting on the guitar in 1963 Erik studied with local L.A. legends Milt Norman and Duke Miller. The latter noted that every time he gave the precocious Braunn a lesson, Erik would come back with a song he had written around the lesson. Not one to interfere with a budding George Gershwin, Miller encouraged the habit. While in high school, Erik also studied acting from the now renown Robert Carelli and won several awards for Elizabethan Comedy, Shakespeare, and a First Place Award for his lead role in “Dino” at the USC Dramatic Acting Festival. This was followed by another first place in the Elizabethan Comedy “A Shoemakers Holiday” at UCLA.
April 21, 2003 – Nina Simone was born Eunice Kathleen Waymon on February 21, 1933 in South Carolina. The sixth child of a preacher mom, she wanted to become a concert pianist. She began playing piano at age three.
March 13, 2003 – Sammy Samwell was born Ian Ralph Sawmill on January 19th 1937.
March 8, 2003 – Adam Faith was born Terence Nelhams-Wright June 23rd 1940 in Acton, west London, the third of five children of a coach driver and an office cleaner. After leaving school, he worked in the film industry, progressing from messenger boy to assistant film editor. He was inspired to form the Worried Men skiffle group in 1956 by Lonnie Donegan’s recording of Rock Island Line. As Faith said in his first autobiography Poor Me (1961): “Skiffle hit Britain with all the fury of Asian flu. Everyone went down with it.” Faith later repaid his debt by producing a 1978 comeback album for Donegan, Puttin’ On The Style.
March 2, 2003 – Hank Ballard was born John Henry Kendricks in Detroit, Michigan on November 18, 1927, but, along with his brother, Dove Ballard, grew up and attended school in Bessemer, Alabama after the death of their father.
February 23, 2003 – Howie Epstein (Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers) was born July 21st 1955 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His father, Sam, was a top local record producer who worked with various rock and roll and soul groups in the 1950s and ’60s. Howie often visited the music studios, watching his father work and occasionally making recordings under his dad’s watchful eye at a very young age. “I would go into the bars with my father to check out the bands he was thinking of working with,” Epstein recalls, “and a couple of times he let me use groups he was working with as back-up musicians for stuff I’d record.”
You must be logged in to post a comment.