John “Broadway” Tucker wins Mobay Award.

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Tucker, who moved to the Monterey area almost 40 years ago, grew up in Mississippi as a sharecropper’s son. At 17 years old, he moved to Memphis, with dreams of becoming a musician. There, he used an unorthodox approach to develop his vocal skills. “I walked down the street singing to get attention,” he says.

When he moved to Memphis, Tucker was more into R&B music than the blues—until he saw B.B. King play a club up close and personal. “From then on, I fell in love with the blues,” he says.

In 1964, Tucker joined the Army and was shipped off to Germany. While overseas, an officer discovered Tucker’s musical skills, and Tucker got a gig entertaining the troops as a part of the USO rather than performing the duties of a regular enlisted man.

By 1967, Tucker was back in the states and stationed at Fort Ord. During this time, Tucker started performing regularly at a Seaside club called Jimbo’s Show Lounge with a cover band named The Invaders. “We played just about everything,” Tucker says of the group. “We played the Top 40 of the time.”

Tucker says that Jimbo’s was one of the premiere spots for African-American entertainers on the West Coast. He recalls jamming with folks like Jimi Hendrix and Paul Butterfield at the club, which used to sit on the corner of Fremont and Broadway.

It actually wasn’t until 1981 that Tucker formed his own group, The John “Broadway” Tucker Band. It was another 13 years before the popular Monterey blues act released their debut CD, >>Mostly You.

Recently, Tucker’s stature has grown outside of the Monterey area, especially in Poland. Back in 2003, Tucker and his band embarked on their first tour of Poland with Polish musicians like keyboard player Wojciech Karolak and Leszek Cichonski, a guitarist infatuated with Hendrix who is in the Guinness Book of World Records for getting 1,581 guitarists to play “Hey Joe” at the same time.

Tucker says that over in Poland people treat him like B.B. King or Elvis Presley, while audiences here have started to take him for granted. Maybe, now that Tucker has a Mobay Award under his belt, local crowds will start to take their local treasure more seriously .