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probably was about 15 or 20,000 people when I was growing up, maybe a few more.
It was a railroad town.

BiTS: And you obviously went to school there. Is that where you found music? Did

you become interested in music whilst you were at school?

OKD: Well, I'm trying to think why I actually started playing. I wanted a guitar.
When I was seven years old, my daddy bought me a Gibson guitar. It was a Gibson

L, second-hand from somebody. I was seven years old and I had no interest in it
whatsoever. He kept it a couple more years, or a year or so, and he wound up selling
it because he said, ‘he's not ever gonna play it’. I never played it. I’d just look at it

and go, nah, I wanna play baseball. He got rid of it, and then in a couple of years when
I was about 11 years old or 12, I started telling my parents, I want a guitar. Can I get
a guitar for Christmas? My dad said, you had a great guitar, and I know, but I wasn't

interested in it then. But I think I knew that some friends of mine played at school
and all the girls were swooning over them. So I said, you know what, I think I want
to play the guitar [chuckling].

BiTS: Was there a lot of music going on
around McComb then? I mean, when I
was speaking before, Bo Diddley, of

course, famous for coming from there,
but was there a lot of music, black
music?

OKD: I didn't know about Bo Diddley.
I didn't even know he was from
McComb, til a little bit later. Oh, I know

what got me interested in it, was I went
to a parade in downtown McComb

when I was 10 years old, they had a
parade for the governor, the political
people had a parade. I went to that
parade and back then schools were

segregated. You had white schools, you
had black schools, and the black high

school band, some of our bands were
walking by playing John Philip Sousa
and stuff like that, and I heard the Burglund High School Band, which was an all-black
high school, I heard them way down the street playing the Bo Diddley beat. I didn't

know it was the Bo Diddley beat. I didn't even know what it was. But they did that
in the marching band and when you got down in a certain place on the main street,

all the bands would stop and play. They would turn toward the dignitaries that were
on the sidewalk, sitting in chairs. They would turn and do a little show for them, and
I was standing there and that black band turned and did a show. They had girls with