Ben Prestage
Ben Prestage’s musical background began before he was born… even before his parents were born. Ben’s great-grandmother was a Vaudeville musican who toured with Al Jolson and also participated in medicine shows. Her daughter was a Boogie-Woogie pianist and painter who used to play for Ben when he was coming up. On the other side of the family tree, his grandfather, who was a Mississippi sharecropper turned Ben onto the sounds and culture of Mississippi and Blues in general.
“When my father was growing up in Mississippi,” states Ben, “ they never had running water and the only electricity was one light bulb that hung from the ceiling, but they had it better than some of their neighbors, because they didn’t have dirt floors. I grew up in rural Florida, on a 14-mile-long dirt road, near the headwaters of the Everglades. It was 7 miles either direction to the nearest paved road, and when you got to pavement, you still weren’t near a town. It was panther, gator, and cottonmouth country. Out there, there was only one kind of music in the house. Whether it was being played on an instrument, or on a recording, it was Blues.
