The Old Man was born a poor black child. The son of a sharecropper on the dusty plains of northern Ohio, he quickly taught himself how to fashion guitar strings from the various plant and animal fibers common in the Ohio wilderness. By age 2 he had built his first conga drum set out of empty whiskey jugs and a beaver skin.
In 1974 he preformed in his first open-air funk jam session where he
was immediately discovered by a kind white family who kidnapped him
and raised him as their own in Florida.
Then known as the Young Man, the Old Man repeatedly tried to escape from suburban life to find his lost African roots.
Finally, after many years of resistance and repeated rejection from the Nation of Islam, the Old Man gave up and went to college.
The Young Man listening to Miles Davis records over at Freddie Hubbard's place
The Old Man in the bauhaus fm studio
Then, in the year 2000, during a failed attempt to sail to Haiti on a
raft of his own making, the Old Man was inadvertently blown across the
Atlantic Ocean and up the Elbe river in Germany. He spent some time in
Dresden until the annual Dixieland “Jazz” Festival caused
him to flee westward.
Since 2002, he has lived in the funkiest town in the former East Germany – Weimar – where he met the Funk Doc, and since 2003 he has hosted the radio show “The Casual Arts” on bauhaus fm.