http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/ent/music/stories/DN-sharriff_18ent.ART0.State.Edition2.297b21a.html
Pianist helps Marshall, Texas, validate claim as boogie's birthplace
12:00 AM CDT on Friday, June 18, 2010
By LEE HANCOCK / The Dallas Morning News
lhancock@dallasnews.com
MARSHALL, Texas – Omar Sharriff thought boogie-woogie piano was his one-way ticket out of town. When he left Marshall in 1955, he never looked back, even as his life narrowed from big shows to a dingy Sacramento, Calif., apartment, meals-on-wheels and gigs that barely covered cab fare.
Then came a phone call from a Texas music historian, who said he'd prove that Sharriff's hometown gave birth to boogie-woogie piano. The historian knew that Sharriff's father played boogie in East Texas and might have learned it from the genre's originators. That made 72-year-old Sharriff Marshall's last, best living link.
Sharriff thought someone was playing a joke, even after the part-time historian, a San Antonio psychiatrist named John Tennison, asked to visit him in California. Sharriff had hated Marshall ever since he saw another black teenager get beaten up by rednecks on the courthouse lawn while white cops stood by. Sharriff left as soon as he could, certain that staying meant prison or an early grave....