In 1982 I left Macon and the music business and partnered with Art Schultz who had the genius idea of selling college condos at uni- versities, it was a huge successful and I re- tired to Tybee Island to speculate in raw land. In 1991 the government enacted a new
wetlands act and I was left holding the bag of several thousand acres of unsellable land and the bank notes that went along with it, so I had to declare bankruptcy. I goofed around for the next decade at the beach and dabbled in new ventures like a Satellite Radio start up, but it was ahead of its time and never got off the ground. After that I moved back to Atlanta in
2003 where it all started for me and knowing the record business like I did decided to help out many talented Blues artists I found per- forming by giving them a platform for expo- sure to a wider audiences. I liked the name King Mojo and showcased the artists and got a lot of Blues media attention and many of the artists have gone on to success. I’m very proud to have been helpful starting their ca- reers.
In your book you talk about the changeover from records and CDs to digital downloads, Napster and such. Your thoughts on that major change in music distribution. I’d always had an artistic nature and probably should have gone to Art school instead of going into the music business. So I took off a year to study web design and computer pro- grams at the IBM school in Atlanta. It changed my life and it became my passion, it opened up a whole new world of ideas for me. All the things I had paid many people to do I could now do by myself with just a few taps on a keyboard. It was a life-altering experi- ence it allowed me the tools to turn anything I could dream of into reality. After learning what was possible via the computer world, another revolution changed
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everything, “the Internet”. Back then you could download any song at the blazing speed of 1400 BPS it took all night, but never the less it was miraculous. The IBM people also demonstrated the future to us, we would be able to download any song in seconds and any movie in minutes. I shared this information with friends
still in the record business, but they all said it was nonsense, it would blow over, a novelty that would never catch on, etc. etc. Then… Napster came along, but still the record com- panies didn’t get it and they kept doing busi- ness as usual. They had a once in a lifetime opportunity in the early 1990’s to capture the global music market by adopting this new technology, but that boat sailed and tech savvy companies like Apple took it over.
Tell me about your alter ego Big Shanty. In 2003 I took another year off to catalog the songs I’d written over the past decades, my hope was to get an established artist to record them. But I needed a demo, so the process began with the help of my bass playing friend Ron Heath. Ron had a friend in DC, Dave Hanbury who owned a studio and Dave liked my songs and with his help we recorded “World of Trouble”. We printed a few hun- dred CD’s to give to family and friends and for me to submit to publishers and artists. In 2006 Ron introduced me to Scott
Robinson an Atlanta producer who worked exclusively with up-and-coming Rap groups. Scott began working with me and mixed his Rap beats in with my blues songs and our first album was “Ride With The Wind”. I al- ways enjoyed the peace and quiet of doing my business behind the scenes and I released the album using the name “Big Shanty”. In 2007 Mark Pucci, “Hall of Fame”
Blues publicist and my good friend from the Capricorn days was on the Big Shanty case with his media contacts, as I promoted Big
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