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Pianist, singer, and songwriter Big Joe Duskin got his start playing piano in church, accompanying his father's sermons with gospel hymns. He began playing piano at age seven, but the sounds of bluesmen passing through Cincinnati, OH, caught his ear and his imagination, and his life changed. Duskin was born February 10, 1921, in Birmingham, AL, the third youngest of 11 children. His father was a preacher who found steady work on the railroad and moved the family to Cincinnati. Duskin grew up not far from the Union Terminal train station where his father reported to work. Cincinnati, situated as it is on the Ohio River, was a bustling place in the 1930s and '40s, owing to plentiful jobs on the riverboats and the railroads. As a teenager he became enamored with blues, and loved the recordings and live shows of people like Memphis Slim, Roosevelt Sykes, and Pete Johnson. His father, Rev. Perry Duskin, would catch his son playing "the Devil's music" on the piano from time to time and mad...