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The result was that, in 1966, I was offered the role of bass guitarist in a seven-piece group that became known as Sly and the Family Stone. A regular patron was so impressed that she telephoned a disc jockey, Sly Stone, and urged him to listen to me. In this way I developed my own distinctive thumping-and-plucking style of bass playing. To make up for the lack of a drummer, I thumped and plucked the bass strings of my guitar to accentuate the rhythm. At the age of 15, I began playing in nightclubs as part of the Dell Graham Trio, which was made up of my mother on piano, me on lead guitar, and a drummer.
LARRY GRAHAM ONE IN A MILLION YOU PROFESSIONAL
By the time I was 13, I had my own professional rock ’n’ roll band called The Five Riffs. Later, I learned to play the drums, the clarinet, and the saxophone. When I was 11, my father gave me his guitar and amplifier, and I eagerly set about learning this new instrument. Two years later, I learned the piano under the guidance of my grandmother, who cared for me in those early years. Soon afterward my family moved to Oakland, California, where I started tap dancing at the age of five. She was a pianist with the church choir, and my father was a jazz guitarist. In 1946 I was born into a musical family in Beaumont, Texas, my mother’s only son. However, before describing it, let me explain things that shaped my life. I have found a rare treasure, a ‘one in a million’ find. That was indeed a thrilling moment, but it is now far from the most memorable event of my life. A tremendous roar of approval came from the throats of half a million people as they called for an encore of our performance. I was the bass guitarist and singer with Sly and the Family Stone, one of the best-known music groups of the time. A sea of humanity stretched as far as the eye could see. So when I did ‘One In A Million,’ I was really going back to something that I’ve always been comfortable with.”Īs noted, that comfort paid off: Graham took “One in a Million” and turned it into a top-10 hit on the Billboard Hot 100 and a #1 R&B single.THE New York Woodstock Music Festival in 1969 was the most thrilling moment of my musical career. The end result was everybody got a chance, or more people got a chance, to hear that side of me which was really going back to the times when my mother and I performed together, because she would always have me singing ballads. Of course, in time, the record company did see that, ‘Hey, there’s something here,’ and then of course they got behind it and supported it as well. Despite the fact that at first it didn’t get a lot of attention from the record company, the folks who love and support me heard it and they made it what it became, so I’ve always been appreciative of that. “But I had the right to choose the single, and that’s the one I felt in my heart was the one. “At the time I did the song, it wasn’t a song that the record company was happy with me releasing because all of my records were mostly funk oriented, so I know that made them a little nervous,” Graham told the website Reflections in Rhythm in 2010.
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You may also be aware that he was already a pretty big deal prior to that band, having been smacking the bass for Sly and the Family Stone, but just in case you didn’t know that.
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Written by Sam Dees, who also penned such hits as Atlantic Starr’s “Am I Dreaming,” Glady Knight and the Pips’ “Save the Overtime (For Me),” and the George Benson / Aretha Franklin duet “Love All the Hurt Away,” “One in a Million” was the title track of Graham’s 1980 album, which was also his first LP after stepping away from his band Graham Central Station. 39 years ago today, Larry Graham hit his chart high on the Billboard Hot 100 with the most successful single of his solo career, a track which had actually topped the R&B Singles chart a few weeks earlier.