Daniel Boone born 31 July 1942

Daniel Boone (31 July 1942 – 27 January 2023) was an English pop musician who became a one-hit wonder in the United States with the single "Beautiful Sunday" in 1972. 

The Beachcombers

Daniel Boone was born Peter Charles Green. Born and raised in Birmingham, England, Green began his musical career in 1958, when he joined a local band called the Beachcombers. In 1960, the Beachcombers met vocalist Tommy Bruce, who had just scored a hit single with his interpretation of "Ain't Misbehavin'." The record was credited to Tommy Bruce & the Bruisers, but a group of session musicians backed Bruce for the recording, and the Beachcombers were recruited by Bruce to be "the Bruisers" for live dates. 

Tommy Bruce & The Bruisers

The group went on using the name the Bruisers when they signed a record deal with EMI. "Blue Girl" was released on 11 July 1963, and entered the UK charts on 8 August, eventually reaching number 31. On the strength of this hit, the band appeared on the Thank Your Lucky Stars television show on 26 October, performing the follow-up "I Could If I Wanted To". This was probably the only TV appearance of the Bruisers as a group.   Green took the stage name Lee Stirling, and cut a solo single, "My Heart Commands Me" b/w "Welcome Stranger," in 1963. Between 1963 and 1964, he appeared on six Parlophone singles credited either to the Bruisers or Lee Stirling & the Bruisers. 

The Bruisers broke up in 1967 and Stirling became the co-owner, with Bernard Mattimore, of a recording studio in London's Whitechapel Road, which specialised in covering contemporary chart material. Then he he issued six singles as Peter Lee Stirling through Decca and MCA, but none of the records under this name entered the UK chart. As Peter Lee Stirling he appeared solo on later editions of Thank Your Lucky Stars and also on Ready Steady Go! Stirling went on to write or co-write "I Think of You" and "Don't Turn Around", both of which were hits for The Merseybeats,  and co-wrote "I Belong" for Kathy Kirby, which came second in the Eurovision Song Contest in 1965. He subsequently joined the studio band 'Hungry Wolf' for one album, and when they became 'Rumpelstiltskin' he worked with them for a further two albums. He also wrote musical scores for the films Groupie Girl and Goodbye Gemini. 

                                   

In 1971, he struck a deal with Penny Farthing Records, a label founded by producer Larry Page, and adopted yet another stage name, Daniel Boone, in tribute to the American outdoorsman and folk hero. His first release for Penny Farthing, "Daddy Don't You Walk So Fast," was a cover of a tune that was a hit for Wayne Newton in the United States, and it rose to number 17 on the U.K. singles chart. The follow-up, "Mamma," fell on deaf ears, but in March 1972, Penny Farthing released "Beautiful Sunday," which Boone wrote in tandem with Rod McQueen. 

The song peaked at number 21 in the U.K., and at number 15 in the United States, while the single was a chart hit in Argentina, Australia, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, South Africa, and Scandinavia. The song also became an unofficial anthem of the Scottish football club Dundee United. An album, Beautiful Sunday, followed in September 1972, and Mercury Records (which issued "Beautiful Day" and the Daniel Boone album in the United States) issued two follow-up singles, neither of which made the Top 40. In 1972, Boone was the recipient of the "Most Likeable Singer" award from Rolling Stone magazine. 

Arriving in 1975, "Run Tell the People" b/w "Rock and Roll Bum" was Boone's last single release in the United States, though he remained active in the U.K. through the '70s and into the early '80s. While Boone's recording career faded out, he continued to work as a songwriter and had  a working relationship with David Byron (Uriah Heep), and co-wrote and produced Byron’s 1978 solo album Baby Faced Killer. The pair also worked on a number of disco/dance releases under such names as Warlord, The Intergalactic Orchestra, and Technique who scored a hit with “Michael Angelo”. Boone ended the ’70s with his 1979 solo album All My Own Work (a Canada only release). 

In the ’80s, as Boone, he released a solo album in 1985 “I’m Only Looking,” and played on Peter Green’s (ex Fleetwood Mac) 1983 album Kolors. He also co-wrote 2 tracks that appeared on the first Byron Band single, as well as co-wrote and appeared on releases by guitarist Robin George. Boone continued his career as a composer and, in 1992 he collaborated with Larry Page to provide The Troggs with two songs for their Athens Andover album ("Tuned into Love" and "Hot Stuff"). 

Boone died in Paignton, Devon on 27 January 2023, at the age of 80 due to heart failure. 

(Edited from Wikipedia & AllMusic)

David Sanborn born 30 July 1945

David Sanborn (July 30, 1945 – May 12, 2024) was an American alto saxophonist. He worked in many musical genres; his solo recordings typically blended jazz with instrumental pop and R&B. He played with many of the jazz greats and collaborated with David Bowie and Stevie Wonder. 

David jamming at 16 years old.

Born David William Sanborn, in the city of Tampa, Florida, he was brought up in Kirkwood, Missouri, a suburb of St Louis. At the age of three, he suffered polio damage to his lungs and his left arm and leg. At 11, having already begun studying the piano, he was advised by a doctor to switch to a wind instrument to improve his breathing. His parents loved jazz, and soon he was falling heavily under the spell of Hank Crawford, the featured alto saxophonist with the band of the singer Ray Charles, a player whose work combined the elements of jazz, blues and gospel music. By his mid-teens he was visiting St Louis nightclubs to sit in with such visiting R&B artists as Albert King and Little Milton and playing with a trio including the Hammond organist Don James, a disciple of Jimmy Smith. 

He studied music first at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and then at the University of Iowa. One summer in the early 60s he also attended the National Stage band camp in Indiana, where he met other promising teenagers, including the pianist Keith Jarrett, the vibraphonist Gary Burton and the trumpeter Randy Brecker. Back home in St Louis, he spent time with the trumpeter Lester Bowie, the drummer Phillip Wilson and the saxophonists Julius Hemphill, Oliver Lake and Hamiet Bluiett, adventurous local jazz musicians who would go on to establish themselves as leading figures in the avant garde of a later generation. It was through Wilson that in 1967 he joined Paul Butterfield, with whom he made his recording debut on an album titled The Resurrection of Pigboy Crabshaw. In 1969 Sanborn  appeared at the Woodstock festival with Butterfield’s Blues Band, filling the breakfast slot on the final day between Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young and Sha Na Na. 

                                    

Arriving in New York at the start of the 70s, he joined Randy Brecker and his brother Mike, the tenor saxophonist, in a horn section that was soon much in demand for recording sessions with younger artists. He was a member of Wonder’s touring band (1971-73) before joining David Bowie for the 1974 tour to promote the release of Diamond Dogs and to perform songs from the forthcoming Young Americans – on which, he said, he took the role normally occupied by a lead guitar. Many jazz fans were also becoming aware of him through his prominent role in the Gil Evans orchestra, with which he was featured on Evans’s recasting of Jimi Hendrix’s Angel, performed during a memorable concert at the Royal Festival Hall in London in 1978. 

Familiar to the US television audience in the 1980s through his appearances with the house bands on Saturday Night Live and Late Night with David Letterman, he also co-hosted, with Jools Holland, a series called Night Music between 1988 and 1990, whose guests ranged from Fontella Bass and Lyle Lovett to Miles Davis and Sonny Rollins. Sanburn with the guitarist Hiram Bullock and the drummer Omar Hakim, and bass guitarist Marcus Miller, were the resident band of the series. It was a friendship with Marcus Miller that intensified the influence of funk on Sanborn’s music. 

When his solo recordings took flight, after finding favour with disc-jockeys on jazz radio stations, Sanborn toured extensively under his own name, playing clubs and festivals around the world. His commercial success could be measured in his six Grammy awards, one platinum album (Double Vision, co-led with the pianist Bob James in 1986) and eight gold albums. 

He was certainly not unfamiliar with accusations that here was yet another white populariser enjoying the sort of material rewards denied to Black innovators. But he cherished his links with his origins, continuing to collaborate with musicians from the jazz world, including the vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson, the bassist Charlie Haden and the organist Joey DeFrancesco.  When challenged on his authenticity as a jazz musician, Sanborn responded that his music came from R&B and gospel as well as jazz. “It wasn’t any one of those things but it was all of them kind of mixed together,” he said in a radio interview in 2008. “And that, to me, is kind of the essence of American music.” 

Sanborn was married to his fourth wife, French-born Alice Soyer Sanborn, a pianist, vocalist, and composer, whom he met at the Jazz à Vienne festival in 2016. His first three marriages ended in divorce. Sanborn died of complications from prostate cancer in Tarrytown, New York, west of White Plains, on May 12, 2024, at the age of 78. He was diagnosed with the disease in 2018. 

(Edited from Richard Williams obit @ The Guardian and Wikipedia) 

 

Randy Sparks born 29 July 1933

Lloyd Arrington Sparks (July 29, 1933 – February 11, 2024), known professionally as Randy Sparks, was an American musician, singer-songwriter, and founder of The New Christy Minstrels and The Back Porch Majority. 

Lloyd Arrington Sparks was born in Leavenworth, Kansas. He grew up in Oakland, California, and briefly attended the University of California Berkeley before dropping out to write songs. That got him drafted, although he ended up in the Navy, aboard the aircraft carrier Princeton. He won talent competitions, first aboard the Princeton and later Navy-wide which in turn got him some broader recognition when he appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show. After discharge from the Navy, he toured with Bob Hope and had some acting roles, including the lead in the 1960 crime thriller, “The Big Night.” 

He appeared on many of the variety shows that were a staple of the late Fifties and early Sixties television, playing mostly calypso music. He switched to folk music in 1959 because it was becoming more popular. But his two solo albums, “Randy Sparks” (1958) and “Walkin’ the Low Road” (1959), went nowhere although the title single from the album reached the Cashbox magazine top 60. 

                                 

In 1960, he formed a trio called "The Randy Sparks Three", and they released an album of the same name. The New Christy Minstrels began a year later when Sparks saw the possibility of putting together an ensemble of ten voices, big enough generate a major sound but retaining the basic texture of a folk trio. He combined his own trio with the Inn Group, which included a young Jerry Yester, and added four more members, including Dolan Ellis and also Art Podell, who had been part of the duo Art & Paul. The group name came from Christy's Minstrels, a 19th century performing institution founded by Edwin Pearce Christy (1815-1862). 

Under Sparks’ leadership, the New Christy Minstrels achieved commercial success. Their debut album, “Presenting the New Christy Minstrels” won the Grammy Award for best performance by a chorus and stayed on the Billboard chart for two years. The groups   success was in considerable part a result of Sparks’ relentless marketing of his folk group. He had connections from his earlier careers, and he used them, with the Minstrels appearing on 26 episodes of “The Andy Williams Show,” a popular variety series on NBC, and eight episodes of the folk-oriented ABC show “Hootenanny.” 

The folk music scene previously had been a coffee shop and college campus phenomenon; Sparks brought it to national television and much larger venues. That effort reached its apotheosis when the Minstrels got their own summer season TV show, “Ford Presents the New Christy Minstrels,” in 1964. 

At the same time, Sparks was cultivating another group, the Back Porch Majority, as a kind of smaller farm team for the New Christy Minstrels. The group became a force in its own right, cutting five albums and performing in 1964 for President Lyndon B. Johnson and Lady Bird Johnson. Sparks was also influential in helping boost the careers of Steve Martin, John Denver and Kenny Rogers, with Rogers playing double bass for the group in 1966. 

 Besides his work with the New Christy Minstrels, Sparks also wrote for other artists and was involved in various musical projects throughout his career. He was a significant figure in the music industry, particularly the folk music scene. The folk music scene waned as rock became king, leading even Bob Dylan to stun his fans by switching to an electric guitar at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. Mr. Sparks, however, kept at his craft as the spotlight largely shifted away. In the mid-1960s, Sparks sold his interest in the New Christy Minstrels for $2.5 million and moved to rural Northern California. There, he began a 30-year collaboration with Burl Ives and opened a nightclub in Los Angeles called Ledbetter’s. 

After Ives died in 1995, Sparks bought back the Minstrels and for the next 25 years managed them and sometimes performed with them, mostly in local venues in Northern California.  At a concert in Lodi, Calif., in 2019, the 86-year-old Mr. Sparks was asked if he planned to stop touring. “Hell, no,” he replied. “I’m not retiring. I love being a songwriter. What a joy.” Sparks was living on his 168-acre ranch in Jenny Lind, Calif., northeast of San Francisco, until a few days before his death. 

Sparks died at an assisted-living facility in San Diego on February 11, 2024, at the age of 90. 

(Edited from Wikipedia, Wickersham’s Conscience, Washington Post & All Music)

Chuck Sagle born 28 July 1927

Chuck Sagle (July 28, 1927 - April 13, 2015) was an American jazz trumpet and bass player, composer, arranger, and orchestra leader of space age pop. He worked in four of the nation’s key music centers: Chicago, New York, Los Angeles and Nashville and for such top record labels as Mercury, Epic, Reprise, Motown and ABC-Dot. 

Born Charles H. Sagle in Aurora, Illinois, he excelled at trumpet and keyboards as a high-school student and entered the University of Illinois at age 16. He served in the Navy during World War II, entertaining the troops in the Pacific as a musician and bandleader. When the war ended, he returned to the University of Illinois, where he completed studies in music and advertising and graduated in 1950. 

Chuck joined the Artists & Repertoire (A&R) department of Mercury Records, first in Chicago, then in New York. While with the company, he produced such “doo-wop” groups as The Dell-Vikings, The Danleers and The Diamonds (the 1957 No. 1 hit “Little Darlin’”). He also worked as a conductor for pop balladeer Joni James and r&b star Clyde McPhatter. Sagle apparently continued to do some freelancing, because he recorded a number album for Mercury as "Carl Stevens" and even "Karl von Stevens," a beer-hall band parody ala Fritz Guckenheimer. 

In 1958-59, he was the musical director for Don Kirshner’s Aldon Music. While there, he worked with Bobby Darin, Jack Keller and Barry Mann, among others. He arranged and conducted for Neil Sedaka (1959’s “Oh Carol” etc.) and discovered 17-year-old Carole King. He next worked in A&R at Epic Records in New York. He signed King to the label and arranged and/or produced records for her, Roy Hamilton, Jack Jones, Link Wray, Sal Mineo, Ersel Hickey, Lenny Welch and Tony Orlando. He also arranged and conducted on The Ed Sullivan Show and The Tonight Show. Sagle recorded his first solo LP, Ping Pong Percussion, in 1961. 

                                   

Moving to Los Angeles in 1962, he joined Reprise Records as musical director. There, he arranged and/or produced records for the label’s Sammy Davis Jr., Dean Martin, Rosemary Clooney, Ethel Merman, Frank Sinatra, Soupy Sales, The Hi-Lo’s and Les Baxter. Among the first projects he produced for the label was his own album Splendor in the Brass. His tasteful arrangements skillfully juxtaposed various small instrumental combinations with each other and with the full orchestra, with deftly voiced French horns and saxophones revealing his fertile imagination and versatility. Garnishing these well-conceived performances are solos by such luminaries as Lou Levy, Shorty Sherock, Cappy Lewis, Buddy Collette, Bill Perkins and Emil Richards. This was followed by another Lp “Contrasts.” 

He produced jazz great Chico Hamilton in 1963 and later did arrangements for pop legend Gene Pitney and r&b queen LaVern Baker. In 1968, he arranged and conducted “Valley of the Dolls” for the close-harmony quartet The Arbors. He was an arranger in 1971-72 for the stellar r&b vocal group The Manhattans, notably on their LPs With These Hands and A Million to One and the top-10 r&b hit “One Life to Live.” During the same period, he served a brief stint as an arranger for Motown Records. 

Sagle moved to Nashville in 1972. He arranged music for ABC-Dot (Brian Collins, etc.) and for Starday-King Records and other labels. His first love was big-band music, and he returned to that in Music City by doing arrangements for The Establishment orchestra and Jack Daniel’s Silver Cornet Band. He returned to college around 1984 to study computer programming. Sagle worked in this field for the next decade retiring in 1994. 

Chuck pursued many interests with diligence and intensity. He loved photography and read voraciously, especially biography, history, and science fiction. He enjoyed bridge and Scrabble. He taught a class on Jewish music at West End Synagogue and composed a musical for the synagogue choir. In 2008, at age 81, he arranged and conducted a concert in celebration of his son Jacob’s bar mitzvah at Sherith Israel Congregation. 

He died at the age of 87on April 13, 2015 in Nashville, Tennessee from complications following a stroke. 

(Edited from Music Row, Space Age Pop & Dignity obit.)

Barbara Thompson born 27 July 1944

Barbara Gracey Thompson MBE (27 July 1944 – 9 July 2022) was an English virtuoso saxophonist, flautist, composer and bandleader who played everything from English country music to modern jazz.

Barbara was born in Oxford and educated at Queens College, Harley Street, London and the Royal College of Music, where she studied clarinet, piano, flute and composition. Whilst retaining a strong interest in classical music, Barbara was captivated by the jazz work of Duke Ellington and John Coltrane and developed a consuming passion for the saxophone.

In 1964 Barbara was accepted and given a grant for the performer’s course at the Royal College of Music.  Studied clarinet with Syd Fell, flute with John Francis, & piano with Peter Element at the RCM and saxophone with Charles Chapman outside. During this time she played in many student bands run by people such as Gordon Rose, Bill Geldard, Alan Cohen, and Graham Collier. She was particularly helped and encouraged by Don Rendell, Art Themen, Bill Le Sage, Mike Gibbs, Jon Hiseman and especially by Neil Ardley.

During this time played with the all girl pop group ‘The She Trinity’ playing gigs abroad as well as in the UK, supporting ‘the Who’ on three occasions. Joined the New Jazz Orchestra led by Neil Ardley where she met future luminaries of the British Jazz Scene including Dave Gelly, Ian Carr, Mike Gibbs, Trevor Watts, Paul Rutherwood, Michael Garrick, Jack Bruce and drummer Jon Hiseman, whom she married in 1967. Throughout this period she was busy gaining experience with Graham Bond, Georgie Fame, John Mayall, Mike Taylor, Ian Carr and many others.

She Played in the on-stage band with the show” Cabaret” at the Palace Theatre, London from 1967 -1968. This was such a shocking experience that she vowed to play creative music at any cost and from then on wrote her own music and started her own bands – the money from this show enabled Jon to put together his band Colosseum.

                                   

Around 1970, Thompson was part of Neil Ardley's New Jazz Orchestra and appeared on albums by Colosseum. Beginning in 1975, she was involved in the foundation of three bands:- 1) United Jazz and Rock Ensemble, (1975 – 2006)  2) Barbara Thompson's Jubiaba (1975 – 1983)   (9-piece Latin/rock band) 3) Barbara Thompson's Paraphernalia, (1975 – 2006). 

The band, still touring and recording despite Barbara being diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 1997, became one of the major instrumental attractions on the European concert scene. Barbara’s original and inventive compositions and soaring saxophone and flute improvisations, earned her international acclaim, while the originality of the music appealed to a wider audience than solely contemporary jazz buffs.

Thompson worked closely with Andrew Lloyd Webber on musicals such as Cats and Starlight Express, his Requiem, and Lloyd Webber's 1978 classical-fusion album Variations. She wrote several classical compositions, music for film and television, a musical of her own and songs for the United Jazz and Rock Ensemble, Barbara Thompson's Paraphernalia and her big band Moving Parts. She was a regular, along with her husband drummer Jon Hiseman and bassist David "Dill" Katz in the underground "Cellar Bar" at South Hill Park Arts Centre in Bracknell during the late 1970s and 1980s.

She was awarded the MBE in 1996 for services to music. Due to Parkinson's disease, which was diagnosed in 1997, she retired as an active saxophonist in 2001 with a farewell tour. After a period of working as a composer xclusively, she returned to the stage in 2003 for a tour with Colosseum.  She played the incidental music in the ITV police series A Touch of Frost, starring David Jason. She also played flute on Jeff Wayne's Musical Version of The War of the Worlds.

After she was hospitalised with atrial fibrillation, her attendance in an accident and emergency department was featured in an episode of the Channel 4 fly-on-the-wall television documentary 24 Hours in A&E in October 2020. An autobiography, Journey to a Destination Unknown, was published during that same year.

Barbara Thompson passed away peacefully on the morning of Saturday 9th July 2022, after a 25 year battle with Parkinson’s disease alongside complications with her heart in recent years. She was just 18 days shy of her 78th birthday.

(Edited mainly from Wikipedia) 

 

Bobby Durham born 1942

Bobby Durham (born 1942) is an American country musician. The middle of three musical sons born to a Dust Bowl dirt farmer, he remains one of the last performers from the golden days of the Bakersfield sound. His hits include Do You Still Drink Margaritas; Playboy; Let’s Start a Rumor Today and the classic song penned by Merle Haggard My Past Is Present. 

Bobby was born in Bakersfield in 1942, his brother Wayne in 1948. It was a musical family: Their older brother Ray was Lefty Frizzell’s road manager, and the younger boys performed almost from the time they could walk in a pair of boots. Bobby himself once sang “Pistol Packin’ Momma” in church at the age of 4 or 5. 

Durham first performed professionally at age 11, appearing on Billy Mize's TV show. He performed solo and occasionally with his brother Wayne on local shows such as Town Hall Party, Trading Post, and Cliffie Stone's Hometown Jamboree and in 1953 he joined Cousin Ebb's Squirrel Shooters, which was the house band for the Pumpkin Center Barn Dance. Following this he played with Jolly Judy and the Go-Daddies and with Gene Davis's Palomino Riders. 

In the 1960s Durham signed to Capitol Records and released several singles, including his take on the Merle Haggard song "My Past Is Present". By 1962 he was a member of Gene Davis’ Palomino Riders, the house band at L.A.’s Palomino Club, where the regular patrons included some of country’s finest session players and most noteworthy up-and-comers - among them Glen Campbell, James Burton and Roger Miller. That same year Durham signed with Capitol Records, setting to vinyl songs written by Buck Owens, Red Simpson and Wynn Stewart, among others. 

                                   

In 1965 he was nominated for Most Promising Male Vocalist for the Academy of Country Music Awards and again in 1966 as Most Promising Vocal Group for a duet recording he did with Jeanie O'Neal. In 1968, he released a self-titled album, which was produced by Chet Atkins. 

When none of the recordings provided a commercial breakthrough, and Capitol declined to pick up an option on his contract, Durham joined the post-Buddy Holly Crickets, remaining with the group for five years. After his tenure with the Crickets, Durham began working in Las Vegas in 1972 and performed there for 11 years off and on with his brother Wayne as The Durham Brothers, He also operated a nightclub in Colorado Springs from 1975-78. In 1983 he returned to Bakersfield, California to take care of his family. 

The Durham Brothers released an album that featured the song Do You Still Drink Margaritas, the song became a hit for them and reached number 2 billing in the Australian charts . Unfortunately, the song's message underscored Durham's own struggles with alcohol. Shortly after marrying Tex Pistols vocalist Theresa Spanke in 1985, a conflict escalated to the point where Durham rammed his wife's Corvette into the back of a CHP cruiser. Although they divorced in 1988, they reconciled afterward. 

They were invited to play on the bill at The Grand Ole Opry in 1984. They took their Mother Adell Durham to the performance. "That was the thrill of my lifetime," Durham says. "I just wish my daddy had been around to see it." Durham's music continued to lure new fans. He performed with his band, the Tex Pistols, once a week at Buck Owens' Crystal Palace, and three nights a week at Trout's. 

In 1987 Bobby signed a deal with Hightone Records and released Where I Grew Up. Distribution of the album was also picked up in the UK by Demon Records where the album went Gold. The album featured the songs Playboy and Let's Start A Rumor Today the later of which also appears as track 1 on disc 3 of the Hightone Records box set The Hightone Records Story. 

Bobby has recorded his latest CD Last of the Golden Era, which released in 2010. He continues to make appearances including at Buck Owens's Crystal Palace with his band The Durham Band. August 24, 2010 was officially marked "Bobby Durham Day" in Bakersfield, CA for his contributions to the Bakersfield Sound; they held a celebration and concert at the Buck Owens's Crystal Palace. 

(Edited from Wikipedia, AllMusic & Bakersfield.com)

Gene Phillips born 25 July 1915

Gene Phillips (25 July 1915- 10 January 1990) was a West Coast session stalwart who appeared on a myriad of jump blues waxings during the late '40s and early '50s. Singer/guitarist Phillips was a mainstay of Modern Records during the label's formative years, his Louis Jordan-like jumpin' R&B giving the label many of its earliest best sellers. 

Eugene Floyd "Gene" Phillips was born in St. Louis, Missouri on May 25, 1915. According to his Social Security record, his mother was Lillie Zomphier and his father was Clyde Phillips. Phillips learned to play ukulele and switched to guitar at the age of 11, after which he began playing and singing for tips and graduated through several obscure local bands. Between 1941 and 1943, he played guitar behind the Mills Brothers, relocating with them to Los Angeles, and later worked and recorded with Lorenzo Flennoy, Wynonie Harris, Johnny Otis and Jack McVea. 

Phillips was one of the first important artists to be signed by the fledgling Modern Music Company back in 1946, and probably ranks as the label's second-most important early signing behind Hadda Brooks. Even though he was only signed to the label as an artist for 3-4 years, he enjoyed a lengthy subsequent association with the Bihari brothers' West Coast R&B indie as a sideman. Any serious collector of the Bihari brothers' budget-priced Crown albums should be intimately familiar with Phillips's LP -- it's one of the best Crown acquisitions you can possibly make (especially since there's no CD equivalent yet). 

                                   

Phillips, Charlie Christian & T-Bone Walker inspired guitar and jump-blues shouting began to be featured on his own recordings supported by west coast stalwarts such as Maxwell Davis and Jack McVea. His often-ribald jump blues gems for the firm included "Big Legs," "Fatso," "Rock Bottom," "Hey Now," and a version of Big Bill Broonzy's witty standard "Just a Dream." Phillips's bandmates were among the royalty of the L.A. scene: trumpeter Jake Porter, saxists Marshall Royal, Maxwell Davis, and Jack McVea, and pianist Lloyd Glenn were frequently on hand. Phillips returned the favor in Porter's case, singing and playing on the trumpeter's 1947 dates for Imperial. 

Phillips" later records for RPM, Imperial Records, Exclusive, Federal (with Preston Love) and Combo, were successful locally and he spent the 50s doing extensive session work with artists such as Percy Mayfield, who played on "Please Send Me Someone To Love" and Amos Milburn. After a 78 of his own for Imperial in 1951 ("She's Fit 'n Fat 'n Fine"), Phillips bowed out of the recording wars as a leader with a solitary 1954 effort for Combo, "Fish Man," backed by McVea's band. It has recently been established that he played on the Oscar McLollie sessions from 1954 and indeed he may well have continued his relationship with Modern beyond then. 

In July 1957 Phillips was in Minneapolis playing with pianist Meade Lux Lewis, at the Gay 90s. The last time we hear of Gene Phillips, the entertainer, was in a California Eagle column on February 20, 1958. He was part of the cast of "Simply Heavenly", a musical comedy at L.A.'s Carmel Theater. Also in the cast was Helen Humes, Spencer Williams, and Fletcher Smith. At some point, heavy drinking had become a feature of his lifestyle and Gene became a junk man, having his own junkyard and presumably giving up music. 

The late Jake Porter of Combo Records, who played trumpet on most of Phillips' Modern recordings, said that the drinking and general health problems later in life cannot have helped in any way the onset of diabetes. Writer and historian Jim Dawson and Jake Potter visited Gene in his junkyard on South Central, Los Angeles in the late 80’s.

When we arrived Jake said "stay in the car, I'll go get him because you might catch something". Jake hollered "Come out Gene, somebody wants to talk with you". About five minutes later Gene appeared down the alley, patting dust off his clothes and pulling up his trousers. He had a mop of grey hair that hadn't been cut for a long time. Jake whispered in my ear "He's suffering from dementia, you won't get a lot out of him." Phillips looked a sorry state, was slow talking and quietly spoken, but he did answer my questions, and even went back and got his lap steel guitar to show me. A few years later I heard he'd passed away. Sadly I didn't see any obituaries.”

Eugene Floyd Phillips died, in Los Angeles, on January 10, 1990. 

(Edited from Answers.com, Ace Records liner notes, All Music & Unca Marvy)