(Samuel Joseph Myers)
DISCOGRAPHY 1957-2004 (17CD)
BIOGRAPHY
Myers was born in Laurel, Mississippi, United States. He acquired juvenile
cataracts at age seven and was left legally blind for the rest of his
life, despite corrective surgery. He could make out shapes and shadows,
but could not read print at all; he was taught Braille.
He 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 nondegree scholarship from the American Conservatory of
Music (formerly the American Conservatory School of Music) in Chicago.
Myers attended school by day and at night frequented the nightclubs of the
South Side.
There he met and was sitting in with Jimmy Rogers, Muddy Waters, Howling
Wolf, Little Walter, Hound Dog Taylor, Robert Lockwood, Jr., 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 Ground", a song
that has been covered by Blind Faith, Eric Clapton, Robert Cray, and many
other blues artists; it was also featured on Bob Dylan's Theme Time Radio
Hour show on "Sleep".
From the early 1960s until 1986, Myers worked clubs in and around Jackson
and across the South in the (formerly) racially segregated string of
venues known as the Chitlin' Circuit. He also toured the world with Sylvia
Embry and the Mississippi All-Stars Blues Band.
In 1986, Myers met Anson Funderburgh, from Plano, Texas, and joined his
band, The Rockets.[2] Myers toured all over the US and the world with the
Rockets, enjoying a partnership that endured until the time of his death,
from complications due to surgery for throat cancer, on July 17, 2006, in
Dallas, Texas. Just before Myers died, he toured as a solo artist in
Sweden, Norway and Denmark, with the Swedish band Bloosblasters.....
(Wikipedia)