We used to hear a lot of radio there at the [Piney Woods] school. Jonas Brown had a radio that we would listen to. Jackson [Mississippi] had one radio station we would listen to in the evenings. It was called WJDX. They had a show called In the Groove. Woodie Assaf used to broadcast that show every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 5:15. And then they had another one that would come on Tuesdays and Thursdays called Jive Parade, done by a guy called Alan B. Keaton. We would listen to this on J. B.'s radio just before we went to supper in the evenings. We couldn't wait to hear all these old standards. Jonas Brown would take another student, Andrew Oliver, and me to Jackson to buy records. They had a big record store on Farish Street called Hardwell and Cook's. We would go and get records for twenty-five cents back then, 45s and 78s. They didn't have the 33⅓s, the long-play albums, yet.

We would get a lot of those records and come back and listen to them, even during the daytime between our classes. I was blowing trumpet pretty good by then, I thought, and I went and got a harmonica, one of the plastic ones. I would listen to some of the music by John Lee Williamson, who was the original Sonny Boy Williamson. And the Big Three Trio, Calvin Boze, T-Bone Walker, Louis Jordan, all that music, we'd listen to it. I would take a harmonica, and with what I already knew about music at the time, I would try to find the key that that song was in. I'd find a harp with that key, and I would try to blow along with the songs. It took a long time. I'd collected a lot of them, because I would just go and buy a bunch of them and try to find a key for a particular song. So that worked for a while, and that's how I happen to blow the harmonica today.