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J.D. "Jay" Miller
J. D. "Jay" Miller was a record man from Crowley, Louisiana, whose Cajun, swamp blues, and swamp pop recordings made a notable impact on American popular culture.
Miller was born in Iota, Louisiana, in 1922, but spent many childhood years in El Campo, Texas. However, he resided most of his life in Crowley, where in the late 1930s he played guitar with several Cajun bands, including Joseph Falcon and His Silver Bell Band, the Four Aces, the Rice City Ramblers, and the Daylight Creepers. In the mid-1940s he began to record Cajun musicians, most notably the Cajun string band Happy, Doc, and the Boys.
In the 1950s he began to record swamp pop artists, including King Karl, Guitar Gable, Warren Storm, Rod Bernard, and Johnnie Allan, among others.
Around this time he also began to record swamp blues artists like Lightnin' Slim, Lazy Lester, and Slim Harpo. It was Miller who produced Harpo's "I'm A King Bee" and "Rainin' In My Heart," significant swamp blues recordings later covered (re-recorded) respectively by The Rolling Stones and Neil Young, to name a few.
During his lifetime Miller's studio attracted a handful of mainstream recording artists, including Paul Simon and John Fogerty. Simon, for example, used the studio to record "That Was Your Mother," a track from his acclaimed Graceland album, while Fogerty traveled to Crowley to record a cover of zydeco musician Rockin' Sidney's "My Toot Toot."
Miller died in 1996.
Article from Wikipedia
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