Sam Myers

Samuel Joseph Myers (February 19, 1936 – July 17, 2006)

Biography Myers was born in Laurel, Mississippi, United States. He acquired juvenile cataracts at age seven and was left legally blind for the rest of his life, despite corrective surgery.

He acquired an interest in music while a schoolboy in Jackson, Mississippi, and became skilled enough at playing the trumpet and drums that he received a nondegree scholarship from the American Conservatory of Music (formerly the American Conservatory School of Music) in Chicago. Myers attended school by day and at night frequented the nightclubs of the South Side. Just before Myers died, he toured as a solo artist in Sweden, Norway and Denmark, with the Swedish band Bloosblasters.

Legacy That same year, the University Press of Mississippi published Myers's autobiography, Sam Myers: The Blues is My Story.

In January 2000, Myers was inducted into the Farish Street Walk of Fame in Jackson, Mississippi, an honor he shares with Dorothy Moore and Sonny Boy Williamson II. In 2006, just months before Myers died, the Governor of Mississippi presented him with the Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts, and he was named the state's Blues Ambassador by the Mississippi Arts Commission.