via EDP 24
It's a bit of a change from his native Norfolk hamlet to the home of the blues in America's Deep South.
But young guitar wizard Oli Brown and his band are jetting out to Memphis, Tennessee this month to fly the flag for Britain at a showcase music competition.
The 18-year-old, from Sco Ruston, near North Walsham, will take on more than 90 other acts in the International Blues Challenge at the end of January.
Sessions take place in front of judges in bars and clubs lining streets which, for generations, have echoed to sounds born in the cotton fields alongside the Mississippi river.
The teenager comes from a rather more privileged background, living with his family at a comfortable family home in north Norfolk - but is already carving out a reputation in the blues world.
“You don't have to be a hitch-hiking hobo, or a black guy with an acoustic guitar to sing the blues,” he explained.
“That's a stereotype. But everybody, however good their life is, has bad experiences, including women in my case, which can produce the blues and lyrics you can really feel.”
So with skills honed by already playing alongside some blues greats, Oli is set to play on Beale Street - an address linked with legendary names such as BB King and Muddy Waters.
“It will be fantastic to gig there,” said the former Broadland High School and Paston College student.
“I cannot wait to feel what it is like playing in what is almost a 'sacred' place. It is exciting and unsettling at the same time.”
His musical teeth were cut at the Brown house, which echoed to the sound of dad Graham strumming blues and rock on his guitar.
“The kids used to ask me to turn the music down,” said Mr Brown, noting the irony of roles reversed from the usual generation gap music tension in a typical household.
Oli said: “I didn't like blues as a child, but when I started playing guitar, aged about 12 or 13, I did Jimi Hendrix solos, and the blues came along.”
alled Blinddog Smokin. After seeing a video of Oli playing the Hendrix classic Red House, they were so impressed they invited him over to Wyoming - where he joined them on stage.
“It really opened me up to the blues, and I learned so much from the band, including being encouraged to sing,” said the youngster who has appeared with them several times since.
After a spell with a college band called Blue Evolution, he formed his own Oli Brown Band, with Simon Dring on drums and Fred Hollis on bass, making their debut at the Walnut Tree Shades in Norwich in March this year.
They are now gigging all over the UK and Oli has played in Germany and Holland. He has shared a stage with blues greats Taj Mahal and Buddy Guy, and played with the “godfather of British blues”, John Mayall.
The band was chosen for the Tennessee trip by the Blues in Britain Magazine after getting rave reviews. Oli said that they were not going aiming to win a prize, but hoping to catch the eye of agents and producers.
Most of the band's numbers, which combine blues and funk, are penned by him and he wants to build on his song-writing skills.
They are having to fund their trip, and are looking for corporate sponsors as well as selling, on Ebay, a guitar signed by acts at the T in the Park festival including the Reverend and the Makers, James, The Skids and the Saw Doctors.
To support the band's Memphis trip and the guitar auction visit www.olibrownband.com or phone Graham Brown on 07917 443362.
WORLDS APART
Memphis, founded in 1820 on a Chickasaw Indian village, now has more than 650,000 residents.
It is best known as the birthplace of rock'n'roll, home of the blues and one of the cornerstones of soul music.
Sam Phillips' legendary Sun Studios produced the song that is acknowledged as the first rock'n'roll song - Rocket 88 by Jackie Brenston - as well as the string of 1950s singles that rocketed Elvis Presley to fame. His mansion, Graceland, lies on the outskirts and remains a top tourist attraction. Sun Studios also conjured classics from Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison and Carl Perkins.
The southern city is equally well known for being home to Stax, the studio that gave its name to a distinctive sound in soul. Booker T and the MGs were effectively Stax's studio band, backing artists such as Aretha Franklin, Sam and Dave, Otis Redding and Wilson Pickett as well as scoring with their own compositions, such as the 1962 hit Green Onions.
Memphis had a reputation as the most racially integrated city in the region, and was central to the civil rights movement, but it is also known for being the place in which Dr Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968.
Sco Ruston, by contrast, is a hamlet of less than two dozen houses and farms near Coltishall, and a tributary of the River Bure, which are home to fewer than 80 people.
The only landmark is the derelict ivy- covered church of St Michael's seen just off the main B1151 Norwich to North Walsham Road at the end of the Coltishall straight.
Its claims to fame, as chronicled in the pages of the EDP in recent years, are as an accident blackspot, and where a newborn baby boy, called Billy, was abandoned naked in a front garden just before Christmas 1998 by a mother later given three years' probation.
The hamlet does have an annual blues festival however - in the Brown family's back garden each summer.
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