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BiTS: When did the blues and rock and roll bug catch you then?

EN: My older sister would bring the albums home, all the classic rock, The Stones, Bowie.
Everything out of London, of course, Bad Company. Everything that was just so great in the
70s and she’s three or four years older. She said you have to learn this, Blind Faith, Eric
Clapton. Of course, all the blues too, she would bring home. My dad would play the B.B. King
albums and Albert King and Son House and stuff like that, and we just listened to all this music
all the time. But the rock and roll blues connection came with the classic rock from the
explosion of blues-rock.

BiTS: I gather from your bio that you actually won a Detroit music prize in 2016?

EN: Yes, I have the chart music award in blues
and then I have one award, the Detroit Black
Music Award, the blues entertainer of the year
2019 and I’m the only Caucasian to ever win it.

BiTS: Tell me something about becoming a
professional musician. Did you have a number of
bands before you turned pro?

EN: I had my own band in high school and I would
go to the cafeteria at lunch time and we’d perform
for everybody, and it was a fabulous band. We did
all classic rock tunes. All my favourites Led
Zeppelin, Rolling Stones, Peter Frampton. We did
old blues tunes and it was just one of the things I
loved. I never could stop doing it. I had a natural
kind of a gritty voice - not exactly how it is now,
but it was always leaning towards that and
everyone in the band was a little bit older. There
were a few guys that were eight years older.

They’d come to the high school and play. I don’t
know how legal that was, but it worked out.
Everybody came to watch us.

From there, I went to music school at Wayne
State University because my dad said you have to
have a degree to live here and I thought, how
hard can that be? How hard can a music degree be? I already do it, but it turned out I studied
opera and I decided I wanted to learn those techniques. It has helped me with singing seven
nights a week, the techniques from opera, but I also was studying with Barrett Strong. He
walked into a health food store I was working in. I was singing in the back, Ian, and he walked
in and said you sound great. I said thank you and he said why don’t you come into my studio;
I’d like to hear you.

I told him I played piano and I didn’t believe he was anyone big because I didn’t really know
about Barrett Strong. He’s behind the scenes. He wrote all the hits for the Temptations, Marvin
Gaye - I’m sure you know and his very first hit was ‘Money, (That’s What I Want)’. He got that
groove, he said, from Ray Charles and they were friends in high school. In fact, he knew him
very well and he’s from Mississippi.