Sonny Boy Terry has long been considered Houston's top harmonica player. No overnight sensation, nearly twenty three years ago, Terry migrated from small town middle America and worked his way up through the ranks of Houston's blues hierarchy. He now fronts one of the top blues acts along the gulf coast. He recently signed with the promising Austin, TX. blues label Doc Blues Records, who plan to reissue his well received "Breakfast Dance" in the spring of 2003 along with a newly recorded "Live at Miss Ann's Playpen".

Born Terry Jerome and raised in rural northwest Ohio in the small farm and factory town of Van Wert near Ft Wayne, Indiana., Terry had a typical blue collar upbringing by most accounts. His father was a union meatcutter for A&P groceries and his mother was a bookkeeper at a fertilizer plant. Baseball was always his passion as a boy and he was and still is an avid fan of the New York Yankees. But as an adolescent growing up in the sixties, it was easy to rebel - particularly for a rambunctious but creative youth like Terry. Generation gaps were an understatement in those days, to say the least. Times were definitely "a changin". A 45 rpm record collection soon replaced his baseball card collection. High-powered CKLW/AM radio from Detroit/Ontario was crankin' out Motown and Rock 'n' Roll hits. Terry's older brother went off to college and left behind a gold mine of fifties 45 rpms that included Elvis, Little Richard, The Platters, Gene Vincent and Paul Anka.

But Terry just loved music. Playing music wasn't something he ever really considered. One of his best friends, guitarist Mike Sowers played a mean rock 'n' roll guitar and he inspired Terry to try harmonica." Terry remembers, "I knew nothing about music as far as playing goes. Mike told me if I wanted to play harmonica, I needed to get harmonicas in different keys." With a few pointers from Mike, he quickly began pulling the bluesy harmonica riffs from Led Zeppelin, Little Feat, The Iron City Houserockers, J. Geils Band and Rolling Stones songs along with the folky hooks to classic Neal Young and Bob Dylan tunes. "If I heard anything with a harmonica on it, I tried to play it". Terry says. "I would buy Charlie McCoy, Stevie Wonder, and Sonny Terry and make cassette tapes with all these different genres and styles and stay up all night practicing."

Later, Terry joined Mike in the local Van Wert band Voyager running the sound mixer and playing harmonica on a number of songs. But playing in a band wasn't just a hobby or simply a way of meeting girls - it was a way out of working in a factory or being a laborer. And at the time going to college was never presented to Terry as a viable option. Terry says, "Music saved me. I was rebellious and I had no direction. I simply wasn't cut out to work in a factory and I never responded well to boxed in situations. "You have to realize, " Terry remembers, " we watched Kent State fisco on TV and that was just down the road. We grew up watching body counts of the Vietnam war on the news as kids. In those times, the way we saw it, adults were the enemy, more or less."

Surprisingly, being from a primarily Caucasian environment, it was the blues that truly touched Terry's soul. Terry looks back with fondness saying, "I would buy these blues records where the harmonica was a lead instrument and an essential part of the band. These guys had these fat reverberated sounds electrified through amplifiers like guitars. The more you got interested in the music, the more there was to learn about. And the songs were fabulous." Terry found a dream fueled by the blues harmonica sounds of Little Walter, Jimmy Reed, Sonny Boy Williams, Little Sonny and tons of Muddy Waters recordings. Terry could drive to nearby Elida, Ohio, to Mind Dust Music and buy harps, blues records and Living Blues magazines learning everything thing he could about blues.

In 1981, Voyager had reached it's peak and Terry was fortunately asked to quit his job working the night shift cleaning a cheese cooker at Borden's Foods. It seems Terry took too much time off to play music coinciding with a general overall attitude problem. A friend of Terry's had been transferred to Houston, TX and work in the north had begun to become scarce. Terry had dreamed of coming to the city to play blues with the legends, so he gave his friend a call and he had a job waiting for him at an iron works plant. "I knew some about Houston's blues scene from reading Living Blues magazine so I figured there would be something happening." Terry says, "But I had no realistic idea of how much blues was in Texas and how it was becoming such a movement. I was blown away." He adds, "It was like my spirit brought me to Texas to experience this dream I had. I could see everyone play!"

It took Terry a year or two to grasp what it would be like to play in a blues band. Eventually, he was sitting in with in with bands and at jams when he was able to. But according to Terry, "I couldn't buy a gig until I started hanging out with Johnny Winter's former drummer Uncle John Turner. He was a mentor and he introduced me formally to a bunch of people and I think I began to get some creditability. He knew more about blues than anybody I ever meant. We would talk about Lazy Lester, Billy Bizor, Lightnin' Hopkins, Juke Boy Bonner. Of course, he played with all of them. I owe Uncle John a lot of credit."

By 1983 Terry started playing with the band T.C. and the Cannonballs. They played taverns all over Houston and regularly opened shows for the likes of The Fabulous Thunderbirds, The Nighthawks, Robert Cray, Los Lobos, John Hammond Jr., The Sir Douglas Quintet and many other now legendary artists. This was a great initiation to the Texas music scene.

In 1984, Terry joined Jerry Lightfoot's Essential Blues Band. At the time, Lightfoot was one of the few white people, let alone musicians with connections into the black blues community. Houstonians were well aware of Lightnin Hopkins, Juke Boy Bonner and Eddie "Cleanhead" Vinson, but countless blues artists were nearly forgotten about following the popularity of Motown and the subsequent rise of disco. With Lighfoot, Terry was introduced to many of Houston's unappreciated, but notable blues legends such a Trudy Lynn, Peppermint Harris, Big Walter Price, and Pete Mayes. The band would regularly play side by side with these legendary figures. It was at this time Terry was dubbed "Sonny Boy" Terry by local deejay and MC Bud Jackson. According to Terry, "Bud introduced me as "Sonny Boy" Terry at the Sunday blues jam we hosted at Fitzgerald's sort of in jest. The next day Houston Chronicle pop music critic Marty Racine, who was at the gig the night before prints my name as that. Then, in no time all of the blues guys were all calling me that." The Essential Blues Band would also serve as house band to touring artists like Bo Diddley and also open shows for John Lee Hooker, Charlie Musselwhite, and James Cotton.

In 1988, Terry hooked up with Lightnin' Hopkins protégé, Kinney Abair forming the well know known duo Kinney Abair & Sonny Boy Terry. Although the act lasted only two years, they twice went to Europe backing up Louisiana swamp blues legend and Excello recording artist Jimmy Dotson, playing at festival throughout France, Belgium and The Netherlands. Kinney and Terry also appear on two subsequent bootlegs released on the infamous Home Cookin Records "Texas Harmonica Greats", and "Live at Rockefellers".

After Terry stint with Kinney ran it's course, Joe "Guitar " Hughes gave Terry his biggest career break. Terry worked over two hundred dates a year for nearly four years throughout the USA and Europe. Terry also recorded two CDs with Joe. The first, "Down Depressed and Dangerous" was released on the Dutch label Munich Records and features the Sonny Boy Terry penned instrumental "Holman and Dowling". The second CD is a double live set "Live From Vrendenberg" released on the Dutch label Double Trouble Records. Both CDs are distributed internationally.

Because of Joe's close friendship with the late, great Johnny "Clyde" Copeland, Terry was asked to record on Johnny's acclaimed 1994 CD "Catch Up With Blues", release on Polygram Records. This marked Terry's first appearance on a major label! Terry plays three tracks including the title track and Rain But Terry's harmonica on Life's Rainbow (The Nature Song) is memorable and helps make it one of the strongest songs on the record.

In 1993, because of all the rich rewards and support Terry received throughout his years in Houston, he founded the non-profit 501(C)3 Houston Blues Society. The organization's founding purpose is to promote and preserve Houston's rich blues heritage. Terry led the organization and served as president for three and a half years. In Terry's final year as president, HBS won a national W.C Handy "Keepin' The Blues Alive" award for "blues organization of the year". This is no small feat considering the organization was only in existence for three years! "We achieved alot, " Terry says, "It brought a lot of recognition to Houston blues locally and when we won the KBA, it not only validated our volunteer efforts, it brought attention to Houston's blues history on a national level." The WC Handy and KBA awards are presented by the Blues Foundation out of Memphis, Tennessee.

With all of this experience and background, the next logical step for Sonny Boy Terry was to form his own band. This was a tough decision to make. Terry had the best sideman gig in town with Joe Hughes. Terry also lacked confidence in his singing. By 1995, Terry had almost years under his belt playing harp, but singing and running his own band was a different story. In took a leap of faith, but Terry started his own band with guitarist Bill Allison while at first working a day job as an audio/visual tech at the Four Seasons Hotel. His band evolved and got stronger as his confidence grew as a vocalist. In 2000, Terry recorded the critically well received "Breakfast Dance" on his own label Radiola Records. The CD features gulf coast luminaries such as Grady Gaines, Harry Sheppard, and Joe "Guitar" Hughes. Terry says, " the idea was to the best of my ability capture the essence of Houston blues today from my vantage point. I wanted to document my relationships with all of the musicians I've worked with."

In the past year, Sonny Boy Terry has worked hard expanding his horizons and developing more contacts with the Austin music community. That work has paid off with his recent signing with the Austin based Doc Blues Records. They plan to reissue Terry's "Breakfast Dance" and they're also releasing "Live at Miss Ann's Playpen". Terry always felt BD had a future. "I always thought Breakfast Dance would get picked up, he proclaims, "It's too significant to be overlooked or to ever be out of print. I just always believed in the record."

Terry also has a good feeling about the upcoming live record. "I had two agendas," Terry explains, "One was to make a record with my friend and current guitarist Little Ray Ybarra. I feel he and have something special and I wanted to get it on tape." "The second reason was because I wanted to record live at Miss Ann's." He goes on by saying, "There's something special about that blues club. I guess you could say I had an epiphany there. There's something spiritual or deeply soulful about the place to me. You don't have to go to church to find salvation or personal redemption. If everything falls into place at the right time, you can find it anywhere. I went there one night and sat in to jam and had maybe the most important wake up call of my life. I wanted to capture that feeling or experience on a record. I feel if I could connect with people like that and do something that transcends the aesthetic, the record would really move people. I want that soul to soul connection" Learn more about Sonny Boy...