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Fact #188228

When:

Short story:

A child is born out of wedlock in Memphis, Tennessee, USA. He will be adopted and raised under the name Matt Lucas, and will become a rock'n'roll drummer, scoring a hit single, I'm Movin' On, in 1962.

Full article:

Matt Lucas :
I was born in Memphis, Tennessee on July 19, 1935 and was adopted by a family in Poplar Bluff, Missouri. My dad worked at a theatre there and my mom and he tried tried their best to raise me right, going to church where I sang with them and spoiling me rotten. They were wonderful, caring and loving, but I chose to be a wild, crazy kid, hanging around pool halls with an older crowd that I looked up to. I was in a lot of trouble as a kid and did 14 months in Boonville, Missouri for stealing a cement mixer truck to run away from home in, as well as a few other things. I was around 14 when I got out and took off for Los Angeles, California to try and get into the movies. There I started playing drums with mostly black bands in the LA area.

I came back to Missouri about 1955 and started playing and singing with Cats Bradley, a great tenor sax player. At that time, I was playing on sessions at Dwight Gordon's studio and jamming with Bobby Ward, Ike Turner and most of the better bands in St. Louis. After moving to the south side of Chicago, where I played in mostly gangster and strip clubs, I came back again to Missouri where I played with the Charles King band, Max Sherrod, Jerry Mercer, Bill Rice and Joe Keene, among others in the area.

I joined my friend, Narvel Felts and we were doing lots of sessions and demos at the time that history was being made at Sun, Fernwood and Sonic studios in Memphis. One day, while playing on a session at Roland Janes Sonic studio, I told him about a version of "I'm Movin On" that I made up and how people would run to the dance floor when I would sing it. I think he thought I was nuts, but Narvel and J.W. Grubbs backed me up and we took a couple of cuts on it - So Roland released it on his label, Renay (Roland had released "Trading Kisses" for me on his Good label about a year earlier). At that time, the white radio stations wouldn't play my record because they said I sounded too much like a "nigger" so I went to Rufus Thomas at WDIA radio in Memphis, the #1 black radio station. Rufus asked me why my own people wouldn't play my record. When I told him, he grinned and said "Let me hear it". He said, "Matt baby, you got soul and he played it and played it and he gave me names of other cats, like my late friend John R. at WLAC and Bob McKee at WAOK.

To make a very long story short, Smash records in Chicago leased the record and it became a hit and I was on my way. After "I'm Movin' On", I had a hit of "Ooby Dooby and Maybelline. I continued working rockabilly, blues and the R&B circuit. After having an R&B hit "The Motor City Twine," in Detroit, with Ollie McLaughlin and working mo-town with the Supremes and Stevie Wonder and other Detroit acts, I moved to Canada. I was really down at that time, doing so much booze and drugs. Ronnie Hawkins helped me put a band together and I then had 3 hit singles in Canada and one album on Gene Lee's Kanata Records. I moved to the Virgin Islands in 1975 after another hit in Canada, "You Got A Love" on Quality records. After having a world wide hit record, being married 7 times, having one heart attack and being on the road almost 50 years, I'm still at it. I've been rockin' on cruise ships in the eastern and western Caribbean. I worked a year as Steamboatin' Director with the Delta Queen Steamboat Company while my wife worked as Tour Manager. We even worked together on the Mexican National Railway doing the Copper Canyon run.

I'm finally happily married to my wife Barbara. We make our home in Florida and in New Mexico. We're avid RV'ers and motorcyclists. My plans are to keep on boppin' the blues and do a lot of traveling and motorcycling.
(Source : http://www.rockabillyhall.com/MattLucas.html)