Ezra Charles (born June 17, 1944, in Texarkana, Texas, United States) is the stage name of Charles Helpinstill Jr, founder of the company of the same name which makes portable amplified pianos for stage performance. A singer, pianist, songwriter, and bandleader, Charles had his start performing with Johnny Winter and Edgar Winter in Beaumont, Texas. He was also the leader of Thursday's Children, a rock band from Houston in the 1960s. He invented the Helpinstill Piano Pickup in 1972. He has led Ezra Charles and the Works band from 1983 to the present, when it is now billed as Ezra Charles' Texas Blues Band.
Charles performs jump blues music with his group Ezra Charles' Texas Blues Band (formerly Ezra Charles and the Works) [1] [2] in and around the Houston area. His group was unusual for many years in that it did not employ an upright or electric bass. Instead, Charles played the bass notes via a MIDI device in his piano, which produces a bass note for every piano key played below the "E" below middle "C". In recent years, he has employed an upright bass player. In addition to the piano and bass, the group contains a guitar, drums, and a horn section.
Hailing now from Beaumont, Texas, Charles is the author of a song called "Beaumont Boys", which pays homage to many of the famous musicians from his hometown, including The Big Bopper, Johnny and Edgar Winter, and Harry James.
Charles is known for his lively stage show, which often features his piano catching fire [3] during particularly "heated" performances.
The U.S. state of Texas has long been a center for musical innovation and is the birthplace of many notable musicians. Texans have pioneered developments in Tejano and Conjunto music, Rock 'n Roll, Western swing, jazz, punk rock, country, hip-hop, electronic music, gothic industrial music, religious music, mariachi, psychedelic rock, zydeco and the blues.
John Dawson Winter III was an American singer and guitarist. Winter was known for his high-energy blues rock albums and live performances in the late 1960s and 1970s. He also produced three Grammy Award-winning albums for blues singer and guitarist Muddy Waters. After his time with Waters, Winter recorded several Grammy-nominated blues albums. In 1988, he was inducted into the Blues Foundation Hall of Fame and in 2003, he was ranked 63rd in Rolling Stone magazine's list of the "100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time".
Los Lonely Boys are an American musical group from San Angelo, Texas. They play a style of music they call "Texican Rock n' Roll", combining elements of rock and roll, Texas blues, brown-eyed soul, country, and Tejano.
Edgar Holland Winter is an American musician. He is a multi-instrumentalist, playing keyboards, guitar, saxophone, and percussion, as well as singing. His success peaked in the 1970s with his band the Edgar Winter Group and their popular songs "Frankenstein" and "Free Ride". He is the brother of late blues singer and guitarist Johnny Winter.
Albert Gene Collins, known as Albert Collins and the Ice Man, was an American electric blues guitarist and singer with a distinctive guitar style. He was noted for his powerful playing and his use of altered tunings and a capo. His long association with the Fender Telecaster led to the title "The Master of the Telecaster".
Tommy Shannon is an American bass guitarist, who is best known as a member of Double Trouble, a blues rock band led by Stevie Ray Vaughan. Born in Tucson, Arizona, Shannon moved to Dumas, Texas when he was nine, where he originally started as a guitarist, though he started playing bass at the age of 21. He appeared with Johnny Winter at Woodstock in 1969. He later joined Double Trouble in 1981 and became a permanent member of Double Trouble until Vaughan's death in 1990. Shannon and bandmate Chris Layton later formed supergroups such as the Arc Angels.
The Sir Douglas Quintet was an American rock band, formed in San Antonio in 1964. With their first hits, they were acclaimed in their home state. When their career was established, the band relocated to the West Coast. Their move coincided with the burgeoning San Francisco psychedelic rock scene of the mid 1960s to early 1970s. Overall, the quintet were exponents of good-times music with strong roots in blues and Texas-regional traditions. The band's songs were most noted for the instantly distinguishable organ sound of Augie Meyers' Vox Continental.
Helpinstill is a US-based company that produces a unique electromagnetic pickup system for amplifying grand and upright pianos on stage. During the late 1970s the company also marketed a range of portable pianos ready-fitted with the pickups. These instruments were built by Kimball to Helpinstill's specifications. The company's founder and namesake, Charles Helpinstill, performs in Houston with his band, Ezra Charles and The Texas Blues Band.
Roy Kent Head was an American singer, best known for his hit song "Treat Her Right".
Second Winter is the third studio album by Texas blues guitarist Johnny Winter, released in 1969. The original plan was to edit the songs from the recording session into one album but it was later thought that all the recordings were good enough to be released. The album was released as a "three-sided" LP, with a blank fourth side on the original vinyl. Two more songs, "Tell the Truth" and "Early in the Morning" were left unfinished but released on a 2004 re-release of the album.
William Matthew Noveskey is an American singer, songwriter, record producer, guitarist, and bassist, best known as the bassist in the bands Blue October and Harvard of the South, and as bassist and frontman of the bands (a+)machines and Icarus Bell.
Hard Again is a studio album by American blues singer Muddy Waters. Released on January 10, 1977, it was the first of his albums produced by Johnny Winter. Hard Again was Waters's first album on Blue Sky Records after leaving Chess Records and was well received by critics.
Alan Haynes, born in Houston, Texas, is an American Texas blues guitarist. Haynes has been playing professionally since the 1970s and has performed with a variety of blues musicians that include Stevie Ray Vaughan, Johnny Winter, Albert Collins, Albert King, The Fabulous Thunderbirds, Robert Cray, Bonnie Raitt, John Lee Hooker, and Otis Rush among others. He now resides in Austin, Texas, and plays locally in and around Texas' major cities, especially Houston, occasionally in Dallas and Fort Worth, and also Europe, where he has a following in Scandinavian countries, Germany, Denmark and Israel.
Ace in the Hole Band is the backup band for American country music performer George Strait, who was the band's lead singer before beginning his solo career in the early 1980s. The band formed at San Marcos, Texas in the 1970s, and recorded several singles for "D Records" including the Strait-penned "I Just Can't Go On Dying Like This" and "I Don't Want To Talk It Over Anymore". After Strait attained status as the "King of Country", the group released an album of its own in 1995 featuring vocals from Darrell McCall and Mel Tillis.
Texas Johnny Brown, born John Riley Brown was an American blues guitarist, songwriter and singer, best known for his composition "Two Steps from the Blues". In a lengthy career, he worked with Joe Hinton, Amos Milburn, Ruth Brown, Bobby Bland, Lavelle White, Buddy Ace and Junior Parker. He was born in Mississippi, but his long association with Houston, Texas, gave him his stage name.
Hey, Where's Your Brother? is an album by the American musician Johnny Winter. It was released in 1992 by Point Blank Records. Edgar Winter played on three of the album's songs. The brothers supported the album by jointly playing several shows. The first single was "Johnny Guitar".
True to the Blues: The Johnny Winter Story is a compilation album by blues rock guitarist and singer Johnny Winter. Comprising four CDs, and packaged as a box set, it contains songs selected from numerous albums — some recorded in the studio and some live — released over a 43-year period, from 1968 to 2011, as well as several previously unreleased tracks. The box set also includes a 50-page booklet of essays and photos. It was released by Legacy Recordings on February 25, 2014.
Beaumont High School was a public, co-educational secondary school in the Beaumont Independent School District in Beaumont, Texas from 1898 to 1975.
William Carter Knaak is an American guitarist and singer-songwriter who has served as a sideman in several bands, released his own albums as a solo artist and frontman, and was the lead guitarist in the alternative rock band Blue October from 2018 to 2022. He currently plays guitar and pedal steel in Parker McCollum's band.