Marvin Pontiac

R&B enigma Marvin Pontiac was born Marvin Toure in Detroit on March 30, 1932; he was the son of a Jewish New Yorker mother and Malinese African father, with the latter legally changing the family's last name to Pontiac (believing it to be a proper American surname) before abandoning his wife and child in 1934. Two years later, Pontiac's mother was institutionalized, and the boy relocated with his father to Bamako, Mali, where he absorbed the region's musical traditions before settling in Chicago at the age of 15. There he began playing the harmonica, suffering a beating at the...