JamesBooker

James Carroll Booker III was born in New Orleans in 1939, the son of a Baptist preacher, and displayed prodigious musical gifts from the earliest age. He was playing professionally as a teenager, and his ability to synthesize the full range of New Orleans piano styles — from Professor Longhair's rumba-blues to the bebop of Oscar Peterson — into something entirely his own marked him as exceptional from the start.

Booker recorded his first sides in the late 1950s and became a sought-after session musician, recording with artists across the R&B and soul spectrum. His hit recording of 'Gonzo' (1960) brought him brief commercial success, but his life was marked by struggles with addiction and mental illness that repeatedly interrupted his career.

Despite — or perhaps because of — his turbulent life, Booker's performances had an incandescent quality that those who witnessed them never forgot. His concerts at Tipitina's in the late 1970s and early 1980s are legendary, documents of a musician playing with total freedom and complete technical command. The Rounder Records albums recorded in this period are essential listening.

Booker died in 1983 at the age of 43, his full potential never realized on record. But his influence on the pianists who came after him — Dr. John, Harry Connick Jr., and countless others who heard him play — is immeasurable. He remains one of the great, tragic figures of American music.