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and being the lead singer and the face, to go be a background singer and guitar player, but it was who I was singing
background and playing guitar for. I’d rather be a bag carrier of a millionaire, than to be an overseer of a bankrupt
empire, you get what I’m saying? Blackberry Records back then was a stand alone label. I think Blackberry was started
in something like 1992 so that was very impressive for the home team to start a major label.

From that, and when the Williams Brothers announced they were coming off the road, that left all of us with nothing
else to do again. So I started another group, Castro Coleman And Highly Favored. Before the True Believers quit, and
when I started Highly Favoured, they were still singing, so as long as they were still singing it was fine by me, and
when they quit I wanted to allow seven years to go by before I grabbed the name and did something with it and I wanted
all the old bad roots to be completely done away with,
so it was always my intention to go back to the True
Believers name but during that timeframe I wasn’t
going to do any thing public with the name other than
own it. I started the group Highly Favoured which
consisted of my younger cousins, maybe five or six
years younger than me, and at this particular time True
Believers had taken my live ‘Live At Home With
Family And Friends’ album and signed it with Malaco
without my consent. Malaco re released the record and
Eddie Mac Scoundrels at the Blues Club the record was a success all over again and there was
a lot of money tied up and my name kept coming up
on the statements, so they wanted to know why and I
faxed them a copy of the legal documents and I owned
the record and, no matter what they told Malaco as a
group, legally I own the record and that is my money.

From that Highly Favored was six months old I cut a
record at my studio and delivered the record to Malaco
and we did national television on the Bobby Jones
Gospel Show and we had a hit song called ‘Time Out’.
The album was named ‘Time Out’ and I came out with
© Mike Stephenson
the whole image thing, so that meant we dressed in
referees’ jerseys, glasses with the tape, and the song
list was in quarter time, first quarter, second quarter, half time, so I had the whole concept and it worked. We were like
at the top of the food chain in gospel; we were energetic, we were different, but the same scenario happened, the guys
were afraid of success. They were going to fly us out of the country but the guys hadn’t been on an airplane, so they
got shellshocked, so I went out for two years as a solo artist under that group’s name that I owned. I got burned out at
that point; between True Believers who did some extensive travelling and the Williams Brothers, we did so much
travelling, and Highly Favored did so much travelling, I had seen it all and with me being an innovator and motivator
I was burnt out on that scene. So in 2010 I had two songs on the Billboard charts and I had over half a years worth of
bookings and I quit, I was done. I had worked from home pretty much all my life. I had kids, so I quit for two years.
I came off the road and I bowed out gracefully so there were no hard feelings and everybody respected that I had started
at a young age and I was tired, so they embraced me and I told them I was going to spend more time with the family
and the kids and that I was going to produce records.

So in those two years I produced so many records and wrote so many songs, a lot of behind the scenes work. This was
in the gospel field. Some of the artists I produced were some on the Henry Green session, I produced several songs
with the Williams Brothers and the Spiritual Five, and all this was done in my home studio. In those two years I probably
cut for myself over two hundred gospel songs and that’s mixed, mastered and put away. I was shopping songs to
different artists and one morning I woke up and realised that I missed the road and missed travelling, but I couldn’t
come back out as a gospel singer, so I began to decide what I was going to do.

I thought that I am talented enough to play, sing and write country, hip hop, rap, r&b, jazz, I could do it all. I studied
each industry and looked at my pros and cons, as being a Mississippi guy that wasn’t prepared to move out of
Mississippi. Blues was the one. Let me tell you about the blues. I was old enough to know about the blues and be
experienced with the blues, but I was also young enough to have another forty years of doing it. I was old enough to
understand the blues, to understand what it is and also young enough. I knew there wasn’t many of my age interested