Big Joe Duskin

Pianist, singer, and songwriter Big Joe Duskin got his start playing piano in church, accompanying his father's sermons with gospel hymns. He began playing piano at age seven, but the sounds of bluesmen passing through Cincinnati, OH, caught his ear and his imagination, and his life changed. Duskin was born February 10, 1921, in Birmingham, AL, the third youngest of 11 children. His father was a preacher who found steady work on the railroad and moved the family to Cincinnati. Duskin grew up not far from the Union Terminal train station where his father reported to work. Cincinnati, situated as it is on the Ohio River, was a bustling place in the 1930s and '40s, owing to plentiful jobs on the riverboats and the railroads. As a teenager he became enamored with blues, and loved the recordings and live shows of people like Memphis Slim, Roosevelt Sykes, and Pete Johnson. His father, Rev. Perry Duskin, would catch his son playing "the Devil's music" on the piano from time to time and made young Joe promise to stop playing blues and boogie-woogie, at least while the elder Duskin was alive and kicking. Young Joe made that pact with his father as a teenager, knowing his father was then nearing 80, but Rev. Duskin lived to be 105, so young Joe wound up working as a police officer and a postal worker as opposed to a full-time bluesman. Although he'd carved something of a reputation out locally on the strength of his live shows, Duskin didn't record for any labels until the late '70s. In the early '70s, at the prompting of a young blues historian, Steven C. Tracy, Duskin began playing piano again at festivals around the U.S. and Europe. His first recording, Cincinnati Stomp, was released in 1978 on Arhoolie Records. He recorded several other albums for European labels in the...