Press Release Date: February, 2007 quot;Mississippi's Delta Sonquot; Lamar Thomas 43rd Grammy Nominated Songwriter I dedicate my new studio album CD to the people of the quot;Deltaquot; because of my love of my home, Mississippi. When I was a child growing up between Clarksdale (my birthplace) and Leland where I grew up from 1959 until I left for New York in 1966, I hated the sound of the word Mississippi. But there is little or no need to dig up old bones or open new wounds or summons hateful ghost of days gone past. In many ways I am thankful for those growing pain days because it taught me how not to hate and why not to hate. Growing up in Mississippi, I received my quot;life'squot; education and I graduated with a BA degree in quot;how to survivequot; and how to get along and stay out of harm's way. I acquired a PhD in tolerance, understanding and perseverance by moving to New York when I was just fifteen years old and surviving there. What I needed to learn to survive in the city while trying to learn the music business was mostly about finding my own self-fullillness, building my self-esteem, getting myself motivation, being determined, and setting things in motion to make sure that I learned how to take care of kids and a family. Staying away from drug dealers, gangs, violence and crime was easy to stay clear of after I learned those values. Although I grew up right smack dab in the middles of pimps, drug dealers, hooker and thieves, I was immune to all of it because I knew who I was and where I wanted to go. It was my late mother Rebecca who educated me about people, the world and what I would see as I passed through it. From her I received a great understanding of just what an imagination can do for someone who grows up learning very little and being told that you are capable of not learning much less. Because I grew up in Mississippi, and saw everything negative about the world and about people, during my formative years, a strange thing happen to me, during this dark period of my life, quot;I learned everything that no one wanted to teach little black boys from Mississippiquot; and because of my mother, I tried to learn everything else that there was to learn. My greatest awakening about the world as a young man came when I discovered the world of poetry. This world began with the reading of poetry by Walt Whitman and Carl Sandburg at school in Leland at Lincoln Attendance Center. I did not learn about the likes of Shakespeare, Langston Hughes, Dunbar or Keats until I attended Andrew Jackson High School in Queens New York beginning in 1966. Once I began to read, recite and interpret the works of great poets such as Whitman and Sandburg, my mind began to travel to far away places and I began to see a world that I never knew existed. Once that happen, I would lay in my bed at night in Leland and listen to the Randy Radio show which came out of Nashville, Tennessee. It was a national station that played all black music. As I lay in my bed listening to the music of Sam Cooke, Bobby Bland, Little Milton, Muddy Waters, 'Howlin' Wolf and B.B. King, I realized that I could travel even farther using my imagination. The words of the poets, songwriters and the music of composers such as Duke Ellington intrigued me and made me frightening curious and eager to see and feel the things that these people spoke about in their poems, in their songs and in their musical orchestrations. And although I grew up in the bowels of the south and lived under a constant dark cloud of doubt, s
