Mickey Baker
Mickey Baker was born in Louisville, Kentucky, United States on October 15th, 1925 and is the Guitarist. At the age of 87, Mickey Baker biography, profession, age, height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, measurements, education, career, dating/affair, family, news updates, and networth are available.
At 87 years old, Mickey Baker physical status not available right now. We will update Mickey Baker's height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, and measurements.
By 1949, Baker had his own combo, and a few paying jobs. He decided to move west, but found that audiences there were not receptive to progressive jazz music. Baker was stranded without work in California when he saw a show by blues guitarist Pee Wee Crayton. Baker said of the encounter:
"I asked Pee Wee, 'You mean you can make money playing that stuff on guitar?' Here he was driving a big white Eldorado and had a huge bus for his band. So I started bending strings. I was starving to death, and the blues was just a financial thing for me then."
He found a few jobs in Richmond, California, and made enough money to return to New York.
After returning east, Baker began recording for Savoy, King and Atlantic Records. He did sessions with Doc Pomus, The Drifters, Ray Charles, Ivory Joe Hunter, Ruth Brown, Big Joe Turner, Louis Jordan, Coleman Hawkins, and numerous other artists.
Inspired by the success of Les Paul & Mary Ford, he formed the pop duo Mickey & Sylvia (with Sylvia Robinson, one of his guitar students) in the mid-1950s. Together, they had a hit single with "Love Is Strange" in 1956. After the duo split up in the late 1958, Baker recorded with Kitty Noble as Mickey & Kitty. They released three records on Atlantic Records in 1959. In late 1959, Baker released his debut solo album, The Wildest Guitar, on Atlantic. Mickey & Sylvia reunited in 1960 and sporadically worked together on additional tracks until the mid-1960s.
Around this time he moved to France, where he worked with Ronnie Bird and Chantal Goya and made a few solo records. He would remain in France for the rest of his life. Up until the end of his life, Baker was rarely without work. As well as his influential series of guitar tutor books, he recorded two albums during the 1970s with British label Big Bear Records, one, Take A look Inside, as the featured artist and another as sideman to legendary trombonist Gene Conners.
Baker appeared at the 1975 version of the Roskilde Festival.
Because Baker revealed very few details about his private life, reasons for his move to France were never made completely clear. Some media sources claimed that Baker had grown tired of the business aspects of the commercial music industry in the United States, while others stated that the bi-racial Baker was angered by the growing rate of hate crimes in the southern United States, during the burgeoning civil rights movement.