Heres a question: what does Robert Nighthawk, Earl Hooker, Canned Heat and the Monkees have in common? The answer is pianist Ernest Lane whos played with them all in a long and varied music career. It would be some fifty years after playing on his first record that Lane cut 2004s The Blues Is Back!, his first full length record. Growing up in Clarksdale Lane had the right background for a bluesman; his father was a barrelhouse pianist, his boyhood friend was Ike Turner and Pinetop Perkins was a friend of the family who showed the youngster a thing or two. Ike fell in love with the piano when he peered in at The King Biscuit Boys, featuring boogie pianist Joe Willie Pinetop Perkins, rehearsing in the basement of his buddy Ernest Lanes house. As he recalled: Man, I never seen nobodys fingers move that fast on a piano, he said. I didnt even know what a piano was then, and I saw that dude, man. He was playing piano, and they was rehearsin at John Lanes house. Ernest Lane and I was the same age, and we was comin home from school and we heard this noise. And we went over there, and boy, these guys-this guy was playing piano so fast, man, I couldnt hardly see his fingers! And I said, Damn, man! I wanna do that! Lane said, Me too! Anyway, we started talkin to Pinetop, and he started teaching us different little boogie-woogie things. When he was just a teenager Lane hooked up with legendary slide guitarist Robert Nighthawk. Nighthawk eventually took him to Chicago where his solid …
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