James Booker

Due to Jimmie Booker's health problems, Ora took her daughter Betty Jean (b. 1935) and son James to live near Ora's sister in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, temporarily on several occasions.

Those stays amounted to around half of Booker's childhood up to the age of 8.

James Carroll Booker III (December 17, 1939 – November 8, 1983) was an American New Orleans rhythm and blues keyboardist and singer.

Flamboyant in personality and style, and possessing extraordinary technical skill on the piano, he was dubbed "the Black Liberace".

He was born in New Orleans on December 17, 1939, to Ora, née Cheatham and James "Jimmie" Harald Booker, a New Orleans Baptist church pastor and World War I army veteran.

Booker was a child prodigy, classically trained on piano from the age of six, and played the organ in his father's churches.

He returned permanently to New Orleans in 1948, and enrolled in the fourth grade at a school where he befriended fellow students Art Neville, Charles Neville, and Allen Toussaint.

By 1949, Booker's parents had separated, and Ora remarried to Owen Champaigne of New Orleans.

In 1949 at age 9, Booker was struck by an ambulance in New Orleans, that he said was traveling about 70 miles an hour.

According to him, it dragged him for 30 feet and broke his leg in eight places, nearly requiring its amputation.

He was given morphine, which he later regarded as a cause of his eventual drug addiction.

The accident left him with a permanent limp.

Booker received a saxophone for his 10th birthday in December 1949.

He had asked for a trumpet, yet mastered the saxophone despite not having chosen it.

But he focused on the piano, and by age 11 was performing blues and gospel organ every Sunday on the New Orleans radio station, WMRY (where his sister had performed).

The following year was his last in classical instruction, when Booker learned the entire set of J.S. Bach's Inventions and Sinfonias, performing these at a professional level by age 12.

After James Harald Booker died in 1953, Ora remained in New Orleans.

That year, Booker began high school at Xavier University Preparatory School on Magazine Street.

Ellis Marsalis Jr. was band director at the school at the time, and noted the advanced level of Booker's playing of Bach.

Booker made his recording debut in 1954 at the age of 14, on Imperial Records, with "Doin' the Hambone" and "Thinkin' 'Bout My Baby", produced by Dave Bartholomew.

While these were unsuccessful commercially, Bartholomew subsequently had Booker ghost on piano for Fats Domino, to combine his virtuosity with Domino's popular singing.

Even as a very active working musician by his mid teens, he excelled at Xavier, especially in math, music, and Spanish, and graduated in 1957.

He had aspirations to become a Catholic priest, yet gave up the idea, deciding to express his faith through music.

Booker mastered piano music of Chopin, Rachmaninoff, and Ernesto Lecuona (for example, Malagueña), and memorized solos by Erroll Garner and Liberace.

He learned some elements of his keyboard style from Tuts Washington and Edward Frank, and was influenced by Professor Longhair and Ray Charles.

His main influence, however, was Fats Domino.

As a solo pianist late in his career, he used a backbeat rhythm that resembles some of Domino's piano playing.

Domino and his drummer, Earl Palmer, are considered among the inventors of the early rock and roll backbeat.

Booker's version of this rhythm has been called the "Booker groove".

Joshua Paxton, however, a New Orleans-based pianist and transcriber of Booker's solos, credits the groove to Booker, not mentioning Domino.

Whatever its origin, Booker used this to substitute the original rhythm on a wide variety of popular and folk music.

Many examples were New Orleans rhythm and blues, as "Junco Partner", Fats Domino's "All By Myself" and "I'm in Love Again", Lloyd Price's "Lawdy Miss Clawdy", Earl King's "Let's Make a Better World," and Booker's "Pop's Dilemma."

A few were jazz standards, "Tico-Tico" and "On the Sunny Side of the Street", but also pop rock, as in The Beatles' Eleanor Rigby, and country, Roger Miller's "King of the Road".

In the Booker groove there are traces of blues, stride, gospel, and Latin music.

His 1960 recording "Gonzo" reached No. 43 on the Billboard magazine record chart and No. 3 in R&B, and he toured internationally in the 1970s.

After being mainly a rhythm and blues artist, Booker later fused this genre with jazz and with popular music such as that of the Beatles, playing these in his signature backbeat.

His influence is profound in the New Orleans music scene, where his renditions and originals are most often performed.

Booker's father and paternal grandfather were Baptist ministers.

Both were pianists.

This collaboration would be repeated in the late 1960s.