Tommy LiPuma was a self-invented polymath straight from the streets, a rough-and-tumble Cleveland guy who lived through the wildest days of the record industry and went on to spectacular success, selling over seventy-five million albums and helping to establish musical genres that sold millions more.

Tommy had an ear for music, and listening to music with him was like shining a light into the darkness. He not only knew how to make great records, he also knew why. He heard inside the music for the human component. A recording wasn’t merely an artifact, it was a snapshot of the soul of a person and a song at a magic moment. Slightly curated, of course—that was production.

This is not the definitive history of Tommy. These are the stories he told me over a period of years. Decades, actually. We met in 1972 when I signed to his record label, Blue Thumb, and for the next forty-five years we spent hours, even days, together, in and out of recording studios, restaurants, nightclubs, you name it.

His greatest pleasure was talking about the music and the people and the business he loved, but he was also an avid follower of art, literature, politics, and films and would happily discuss whatever subject was on the table. Mostly, hanging was his forte. He loved being with creative people, enjoying a good bottle of wine, exchanging war stories, and laughing, always laughing. Tommy raised hanging out to a high art.

One of his favorite films was My Dinner with André, in which a couple of guys spend a couple of hours sitting around a dinner table talking about life. But few who sat around dinner tables with Tommy—and there were many, some legendary, from Miles Davis and George Benson to Diana Krall and Barbra Streisand—knew the details of his personal story, how he got into the business of music or why he was so empathetic with the artists he produced. That’s what this book attempts to explain.

Tommy had gone through hell and high water to make that record, but like everyone else, he was surprised when, first, it started to get significant crossover airplay, and then again when it started to sell, and then it kept selling, and by the end of the year it was an outright phenomenon. One doesn’t expect that to happen when you make a jazz record. With jazz, you basically trust that the musicians and the songs you’ve chosen are compatible, that the feeling in the room is conducive to something fresh and alive happening, and that you manage to capture it without too much trouble. Sounds simple, but that’s the trick: “Try not to try too hard,” as James Taylor once said. Tommy knew he had something special here, but nobody could have predicted the gigantic success of that record.

He and George went to the Grammy Awards ceremony together, expecting nothing more than to have a good time and see some old friends. They were up against records like Paul Simon’s “Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover,” so they had little hope of winning.

They wound up sitting right next to a group called Dr. Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band, a zany group of kids all dressed up in vintage gear and having a ball. “One of the guys,” remembers Tommy, “was wearing a khaki army officer’s uniform, one of the chicks was decked out in 1940s jitterbug regalia, and every time something came up that they could dance to, they did it, spilling out into the aisle and carrying on. It was pretty hard to take the whole thing too seriously.”

As the night went on, their expectations seemed to be confirmed: Every one of the awards that he and George were nominated for went to somebody else. At the very end of the evening, Barbra Streisand came out and announced, “The last award of the evening; the Record of the Year.” She read the list of nominees, opened the envelope, looked at the camera, and said, “And the winner is . . . ‘This Masquerade,’ George Benson and Tommy LiPuma.’” The crowd erupted in applause, the band started playing the song, and Tommy and George looked at each other in disbelief.

Tommy says he has no memory of what happened next: getting out of his seat, going up on the stage. Maybe down deep, he knew in that moment that his life had changed, but that’s definitely not what he was thinking. Actually, he was thinking nothing at all. It was just a blur. He does recall that on the way home, the limo driver offered him a free ride, and also that he didn’t stop smiling for three days.

Shortly thereafter Tommy ran into Barbra Streisand at the Palm restaurant in Los Angeles, and on the way out she stopped at his table to congratulate him again. She was chatty and complimentary, and then, just before she left, she gave him a penetrating look and said, “You played me that song first, didn’t you?” She was suggesting that he had offered her “This Masquerade” before cutting it with George Benson. In fact he had not, but somehow, he says, he couldn’t help himself. He said, “Yeah, Barbra, I did.” She smiled and said “I thought so” and turned and left.

From a distance, Alimena looked like a pile of limestone rocks perched high on a hill. Water was scarce, plumbing virtually nonexistent, and everybody drew their water from a communal well in the center of town. On Saturdays, the day when people took their bath, there were long lines at the well, and hauling buckets of water back to the house was a full-time job. When Tommy’s father, Salvatore, was a boy, it was his job.

The LiPuma family lived in Alimena as far back as anyone could remember. The extended family numbered in the dozens, a close-knit group that gathered every weekend to play guitars and mandolins and sing songs that went back to the beginning. Nobody knew where or when that was, but it didn’t matter; music was part of their history, it was in the blood.

The LiPumas rarely, if ever, left the village. There was really no place to go and few ways to get there. The nearest village was Villarosa, ten miles away, and it took a whole day to get there on foot, or four hours by horse or bicycle, if the paths were clear. And once you were there, where were you? Often you couldn’t even understand some of the locals because, like Alimena, each town had its own dialect.

Sal LiPuma, the second of Giuseppe and Giuseppina LiPuma’s three sons, worked like a man from the time he was a small boy. At age six he woke up at sunrise, hitched up the family donkey, and spent the day leading the animal up and down the mountain paths, hauling buckets of limestone rock from the family mine down to the town. The mine, a hardscrabble open-pit affair, was the family business, and everybody contributed.

The paths Sal and the donkey walked had been walked for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Generations of boys just like him had beaten that permanent groove into the Alimena hillside. Sometimes Sal would find an artifact from the Byzantine period on the side of the road. He never picked it up.

In the winter, when it was too cold to work the mine, Sal still woke early and took the donkey to the top of the mountain to collect snow and bring it down to a cave near the mine. There he and his brothers compressed it into blocks of ice that they stored until the following summer, when they sold it as “air conditioning” down in the village. Day after day, year after year, he walked that path, the hard clanking bell on the donkey the sound marking time. Years later, Sal told his son Tommy, “By the time I was six years old, I was already tired of living.”

One Saturday, in July 1905, when Sal was twelve years old and working the mountain with the mule, his father, Giuseppe, went into town to pass some time at a bar. On weekends the place would fill up with men sitting around eating lupini beans, drinking small glasses of grappa, and gossiping.

This Saturday, Giuseppe, who had a reputation for having a short temper, picked a fight with one of his competitors in the limestone business, a man named Sapienza. Nobody remembers exactly how it started or what it was about, but everybody agreed that the outcome was a scandal: Giuseppe slapped Sapienza across the face. In public. In this part of the world, that was cause for retribution. The bar went silent. But Sapienza just sat there, calmly sipping his grappa.

However, two days later, as Giuseppe was riding his donkey into town with his youngest son, Tony, on the blanket in front of him, they spotted somebody up ahead hiding behind a bush. “Look, Pa,” said the boy, “there’s Mr. Sapienza,” but Giuseppe just shrugged him off. When the donkey and its riders passed the bush, Sapienza jumped out and, in a flash, stabbed Tommy’s grandfather in the back with a long carving knife, virtually disemboweling him on the spot. Giuseppe LiPuma died that night at home, and Sapienza disappeared from Alimena the next day.

Word soon came that Sapienza had fled to America. It wasn’t justice that he was afraid of; it was revenge. In Sicily, a grudge like this could last years, even generations, and everyone knew “If you kill the father, you had better kill the sons too,” because they would be coming for you.

Giuseppe’s death left Giuseppina, thirty-two years old, with five children and no income. There was the limestone mine, of course, but unfortunately Giuseppe’s partner in the business, his brother-in-law, took advantage of the situation and stopped giving Giuseppina her share of the money. Soon she and her children were reduced to scavenging for food and clothing on the streets.

Other family members brought clothes and food to Giuseppina and the children when they could. One uncle was the barber in the village, and he tried to teach Tommy’s uncle Joe the trade. But nothing came of it, and for months, the family barely survived. Finally, after two years of scraping and scrapping and doing odd jobs, Joe managed to put together enough money to buy a boat ticket to America. He was going to find Sapienza and kill him.

Joe arrived at Ellis Island in 1907 and after asking around discovered that Sapienza was on the run, headed out west, possibly to California. The man, they said, was always looking over his shoulder, knowing somebody was coming after him. Joe had no money and spoke no English, so he sought out his mother’s brother—a man named John Tedesco. Tedesco had arrived in America a few years earlier and had settled in Cleveland. Joe went to Cleveland, put down some roots, took a job as a clothing presser, and started saving money again. After four years, he had saved enough money to bring over his brother Sal from Sicily. The plan was for the two of them to search for Sapienza together.

Sal spent three days on a mule traveling the fifty miles from Alimena to Palermo, another week going from Palermo to Napoli on the Italian mainland by a combination of animals and boats, and three more weeks sailing the thousands of miles to New York City. And that is how Tommy’s father, Salvatore LiPuma, arrived in America on March 14, 1911, aboard the Sant’ Anna, a freighter that would be torpedoed and sunk by a German submarine off the north coast of Africa just a few years later at the start of World War I. He was eighteen years old. And the boys never did find Sapienza.

His job was carrying bricks in a basket hanging from a wooden pole he carried on his shoulder. It was hard labor, but he saw, without exactly understanding, that groups of men standing around with nothing to do one day were gone the next, and he figured out that if you didn’t look busy, you were fired. So anytime he had nothing to do, he simply moved bricks from one part of the work site to another and then back again, just to appear busy. But it only worked for so long—eventually he, too, was fired. Then he went to work on the crew putting up the Terminal Tower, the largest building in Cleveland and the model for the Daily Planet building in the legend of Superman (a myth created by two young guys from Cleveland).

Sal and Joe were working one job after another and sending money back home to Sicily, and over time, they managed to bring the rest of the family to America. In 1913, they brought their brother Tony, and then in 1914, they brought over their mother and their two sisters, Domenica and Marietta.

The LiPumas were part of a flood of immigrants from hardscrabble towns and villages all across Italy making their way to the new world. Like the Guerra family—Salvatore and Teresa Guerra, along with their children, Frank and Rose—who arrived in America at Ellis Island a decade before Joe and Sal. First they settled in Hackensack, New Jersey, where little Rose became a poster child for the new America, speaking perfect English by the time she was five and excelling in school. In another time or place she might well have gone on to college. But when her father lost his job, she, too, was forced to quit school and pick up odd jobs, often working in sweatshops. Eventually the Guerras also moved to Cleveland.

Both the LiPumas and the Guerras were members of the Alimenese Club in Cleveland, a social organization of expatriates from Alimena that met once a month to have a meal, play cards, and keep memories of the old country alive. The women wore long dresses in the Sicilian fashion, and when the meal was finished, they cleared the tables while the men took their chairs and drinks into the backyard and sang songs, songs that have since faded into obscurity, in part because they were sung in an old dialect that no one understands today, but people who were there say these songs sounded more like laments.

At one of these gatherings, sixteen-year-old Rose Guerra met twenty-two-year-old Salvatore LiPuma, and they began courting. Their grandmothers had been friends in the old country and made the introduction. Sal, who by this time was going by the name of Sam, was still working construction, but he managed to come home every night, wash his face and hands, change into nicer clothes, and go by Rose’s house. There they sat together in the family parlor, along with Rose’s parents, and passed time in the traditional way.

The big question on everyone’s mind was citizenship. To become an American citizen one typically had to wait for years and then study for the big test. But there was an alternative: If a man enlisted in the army and was honorably discharged, he was automatically granted citizenship, and so, too, were his wife and children. Sam wanted to marry Rose, and he wanted to become an American citizen, so he and his brother Tony both enlisted just as the First World War was winding down. They were sent to a boot camp in Georgia in the spring of 1918.

After a few weeks of basic training, Sam jumped on a train and went back to Cleveland, where he and Rose were married on June 1, 1918. It’s not clear whether his English was so bad that he didn’t understand the consequences of his actions or that he simply didn’t care, but when he returned to boot camp a married man he was busted for going AWOL and thrown into the brig. There he became the jailhouse barber and spent the rest of the war in comparative comfort. In fact, he never worked a day of construction again in his life and remained a barber to the end.

When the war officially ended on November 11, 1918, Sam and Tony returned home to Cleveland and opened a barbershop down on Fourteenth Street. Sam and Rose had their first child, Joe, on October 10, 1919. It was a long, hard delivery, and immediately after Joe’s birth, the doctor had to set the baby aside and work to save Rose’s life; eventually she went on to give birth to four more children (one who died very young), Tommy being the youngest.

It wasn’t a big leap. Back in the old country, every family made their own wine—it was just a normal part of most meals, a social lubricant as well as a connection to the deep communal past, more of a sacrament than a path to intoxication. So by making his own alcohol, Sam was merely upholding a family tradition. In addition, as a barber, he ordered hair tonic in quantity, and hair tonic, too, contained alcohol. By edging into bootlegging, Sam was just expanding his operation. Soon he had set up his own still and was producing his own brand of drinkable alcohol. Even after Prohibition ended in 1933, bootlegging remained a popular way for people to make a little extra money. Sam stayed in it until early 1940.

Being an aspiring capitalist, he also discovered there was money to be made selling raw sugar: You couldn’t get busted for selling it, and everybody needed it to make whiskey. So he started dealing in bulk sugar as well, and that’s when he received a visit from the Lonardo family.

The Lonardos were the dominant crime family in Cleveland. “Big Joe” Lonardo supplied corn sugar and granted “franchises” to bootleggers all over town. The Lonardos worked with their paisanos the Porrellos to control the market, but the Porrellos got tired of the arrangement and went into business for themselves; each family formed an army and hit the mats. Bodies began turning up regularly—that’s how the neighborhood became known as Bloody Corners. This was the start of the “Sugar Wars” in Cleveland, and Sam LiPuma had accidently stepped right in the middle of them.

After he received his visit from the Lonardos, Sam decided to move the family up to East 153rd Street and Kinsman. There he and his brother built a three-family home; Sam’s family lived on the first floor, Tony’s on the second, and their mother, Giuseppina, and their aunts on the third. It was a little piece of the old world, a mixed neighborhood of Italians and Jews, more respectable than Bloody Corners but with plenty of numbers runners, bootleggers, and wiseguys within a radius of a few blocks.

Joe, the eldest of the LiPuma children, had the hardest time adjusting; raised in a three-family house where everyone spoke Sicilian, he barely spoke English. His parents found him a tutor, but the tutor spoke Italian, not the Sicilian dialect that Joe knew, so the lessons were virtually useless. Joe did poorly at school; his hero was Lucky Luciano, the mobster. By the time he got to high school, Joe would show up dressed like a gangster, in a full-length overcoat, gray felt fedora, and triple-A shoes with white stitching around the soles.

He dropped out of high school and became what his father bitterly referred to as a “drugstore cowboy,” because he mostly just loafed around Levitt’s soda fountain, a little joint across the street from their house. When his father finally lost patience with him and pulled him off the streets, Joe took a job at a linen cleaning company, where he worked until the day he had to handle damp, bloody sheets from a mortuary. After that, it wasn’t hard for Sam to persuade him to become a barber.

For the next year, Sam dropped Joe off at the entrance to the barber college, but even as the car pulled away from the curb, Joe would be heading for the pool hall. Joe made it through barber college and went to work with his father, first at the barbershop and then in the bootlegging business.

At seventeen, Joe was delivering whiskey and picking up cash for Sam’s operation. He drove a 1935 Ford coupe with a rumble seat and a V-8 engine that would do 100 mph, the perfect moonshiner’s car, outfitted with truck springs on the rear so it wouldn’t ride too low when it was loaded with five-gallon cans of alcohol. (On the way home, after the booze was delivered, Joe would put cement blocks in the back so the car wouldn’t “ride high”; riding too high or too low was a dead giveaway to the cops.)

Once he was hijacked by the same guys he had just sold the whiskey to—threading his way home through the back roads at night, they forced him off the road, held him up at gunpoint, and told him, “Don’t do nothing stupid”—and once he drove right into a federal roadblock. But luckily that night, Joe had his grandmother Giuseppina along for cover: just a boy and his grandmother out for an evening’s drive. When the cops looked in the window all they saw was an old woman knitting, and they waved Joe through.

This was the family life into which Tommy LiPuma was born on July 5, 1936; his brother Joe was seventeen, his next brother, Henry, was fifteen, and his sisters, Josephine and Terese, were twelve and nine. Years later, Henry told Tommy that he had been an accident and that his father had wanted his mother to have an abortion, but his mother refused. So Tommy was not only an accident but a product of his mother’s love, independence, and determination.

And even though Joe was the oldest of the five LiPuma children, he was really in the middle, in between the old Sicilian ways and the new American reality, between the protection of his grandmother’s generation and the unknown future of the wide-open roads.

It’s the story of many first-generation families in America. What remains so remarkable is that in just one short generation, the LiPuma family would travel from the donkey paths of a Sicilian mountainside to Hollywood’s red carpet.

Through his whole life, Joe remained more Sicilian than American. Every Saturday on his way to work, he would stop by the Lamarca brothers’ barbershop to check in with all the neighborhood wiseguys; he admired their pockets full of cash and their slicked-back hair. In the end, it turned out the Lamarca shop was under surveillance by the feds and several of the regulars went to jail, but Joe was never questioned.

Henry, on the other hand, was a real middle-American kid who went on to become a high school teacher and the owner of a small insurance agency. From the beginning, all he wanted was to blend in, to be normal. He went to Shaker Heights High, where, Tommy says, he “fell in with a crowd of guys with names like Dave Morgan and Jim Milligan.” Henry was a preppy dresser and a country club golfer; Joe worked in the barbershop, Henry sang in a barbershop quartet.

These two forces, the new world and the old, the love of the old traditions and the allure of the American dream, shaped not only Tommy’s family but also the music Tommy would one day come to love and produce.

The music they listened to was what teenagers everywhere were listening to: Frankie Laine, Jo Stafford, the Mills Brothers, Johnny Mercer’s “Ac-Cen-Tchu-Ate the Positive,” Les Brown’s “Sentimental Journey,” Harry James’s “It’s Been a Long Long Time.” In the 1940s, kids sat in front of the radio for hours, swooning over songs, going around the dial searching for programs like Your Hit Parade. It was the start of teenage America.

From the time he was able to talk, Tommy was singing. The first song he learned was “Paper Doll” by the Mills Brothers. He would sing it nonstop, and when he went for a ride with his father, Sam would say to Tommy, “Sing me that Doll song.” Their ’41 Oldsmobile had no radio, and Tommy was the entertainment.

He always had a good ear for music. He remembers once his mother tried to make him take a nap by singing him a lullaby. “My mother, bless her heart, could not carry a tune,” he says, “and when she got a few bars into the song, apparently I told her, ‘That’s okay, Mommy, stop singing and I’ll go to sleep.’”

And then there was Eddy. Eddy lived across the street from the house where Tommy grew up, in a small frame house with an old wooden swing on the front porch. Eddy was in his thirties but he was born with cerebral palsy and had the mind of a five-year-old. He spent his days dressed in overalls and an old cap, swinging on the porch swing, just watching life pass by. Sometimes Tommy, who was five years old himself, would go over and sit next to Eddy on the swing and talk with him. He could hardly understand what Eddy was saying, but the man was so gentle and nice that they would sit together and swing for hours. Eddy’s heavy work boots had literally worn big grooves in the porch. Years later Tommy took a friend to see Eddy’s porch; the grooves were still there. Tommy shook his head and said, “You can see his whole life in that floor.”

So at a very tender age, Tommy had already demonstrated a fine ear for music, a love of swinging, and a deep compassion for people—all the tools he would need for a future as a record producer. The only thing lacking was the motivation. That would come in a few years.

Eventually Sam paid off the right guy and Joe received a new trial, at which he was acquitted. He was out of jail by the fall of 1941, and within weeks of his release, he received his draft notice. When he and the other inductees marched from the federal building to the train station, his father Sam marched right next to him, all the way down Euclid Avenue, wearing a clean white shirt and a stiff straw hat, proud to be an American.

Joe didn’t come home until the Japanese surrendered four years later, after he had made landings with the 27th Infantry Division on Makin Atoll, Eniwetok, Saipan, and Okinawa. After forty-eight months in the Pacific it was a miracle he came back at all. He had earned several ribbons including the Bronze Star. Meanwhile, Henry, who had enlisted in 1941, was stationed in an office, never left the United States, and spent the war pushing papers; in Joe’s eyes, it was further proof that Henry was a weakling.

The neighborhood where Sam moved next was primarily Jewish. There were still a lot of wiseguys hanging out, including both Don King, the fight promoter who went to jail for murder, and Shondor Birns, who was eventually blown up by the mob. Tommy ended up with mostly Jewish friends, including his best friend, Errol Kwait. Tommy called him Ede (pronounced “E.D.”), and between the ages of six and ten, he and Tommy were inseparable, in and out of each other’s houses at all hours of the day and playing in the streets until after dark. Their favorite game was pretending that they were big-league baseball players, throwing grounders to each other and announcing the imaginary game for hours.

Years later it would occur to Tommy that one of the reasons he was so comfortable in the record business was that it was primarily a Jewish business and he was always comfortable around Jews. So when Ede went to a Jewish Federation camp, Tommy went too—he even had his own yarmulke and could say the bruchas (the blessings over bread and wine).

Tommy says he didn’t really understand what being Jewish meant until the day his father took him to visit a cousin, Frank, who manufactured pasta for a living. Sam parked the car in front of Frank’s place and told Tommy to wait for him there. Tommy was sitting behind the wheel, pretending to be driving, when he noticed three kids throwing stones at a building. The building was a Jewish synagogue.

Tommy rolled down the window and asked why they were throwing stones, and they said, “’Cause that’s where the Jews pray.” “And they used the expression ammazza cristiani,” he remembers. “I knew enough Italian to understand that meant ‘Christ killers.’” It was his first introduction to anti-Semitism.

“I was very fortunate that my parents were not particularly prejudiced,” Tommy says. “Well, to a point, meaning I’m not sure how they would have felt if I came home with a black wife. Actually, come to think of it, I do know exactly how they would have reacted to that. Because once we had a big family picnic in the park, about thirty or forty people, and it started to rain heavily and everyone ran for the shelter. It turns out there was a group of African Americans who also ran for cover, and my relatives were not too happy about sharing the shelter with them. On the African American side, they were having a great time, playing music and laughing, while everyone on our side had a farbisseneh face on.

“I was digging the action across the room and I recognized a friend of mine who was part of their group. We caught each other’s eye and ran toward each other and hugged. We talked for a while, then hugged again, and I went back to the Italian side of the shelter. All of my relatives looked at me like I had just caught the plague.”

There was also a time that Tommy’s father had his African American porter from the barbershop come over on a Sunday to paint window screens. When it was time for dinner, Sam brought him a plate of pasta. After they had all finished eating and Tommy’s mother was washing dishes, Sam came in with the porter’s empty plate and said in Italian, “This is the plate the porter ate from.” Tommy’s mother asked him in Italian with a straight face, “What do you want me to do, throw it out?”

“Looking back,” says Tommy, “I think if I wasn’t an atheist, I probably would have taken up Judaism. To me, it’s the most civilized form of religion I can think of, at least the reformed Jews are. I can remember the first service I went to with Ede. Everyone in the congregation was able to get up and say something, unlike the Catholic faith that I was brought up in, where everything was hush-hush and very serious and there was a lot of talk about hell and mortal sin.”

And he saw that superstition and the old ways could create a lot of misery. He had a friend named Donny, from a rough-and-tumble Italian family with five kids. Donny’s father was old world too, a mechanic who used to sit down to eat dinner with black grease on his hands. From time to time, he would reach across the table and slap Donny if he didn’t like his son’s behavior. “He was,” says Tommy, “an absolute animal.” One day Tommy went over to their apartment to see his friend, and Donny’s little sister, a girl about four years old, was alone in the living room. Tommy asked her, “Is Donny here?” and she said, “He’s in the other room.” When Tommy went into the bedroom he found Donny and his two brothers bound and gagged.

In many ways it was a dark time. World War II cast its shadow over much of Tommy’s childhood. There were air raid alerts at night, when you were required to turn off all your lights and the Civil Patrol people wearing white helmets would walk the neighborhoods, making sure you obeyed orders. One night his father was standing at the window smoking a cigarette when the Civil Patrol knocked on the door and told him, “No cigarettes. No lighters. Nothing.” Darkness, darkness.

The war worked its way into his consciousness in ways big and small; when he went to see a Saturday matinee, he would bring a piece of junk metal and throw it onto the pile for the “war drive,” and then he got in for free. As a kid, he was a car fanatic, and they even stopped making cars from 1942 to 1946; instead, the automobile factories were producing army vehicles.

With both his brothers in the military, Tommy became the center of his family’s attention, and he was, in his own words, “spoiled and pampered,” not just by his mother but also by his two sisters. Josephine (the younger of the two, whom he called Babe) took on the role of surrogate mother; it was Babe who called him home for dinner when it was getting dark outside and he and Ede were playing ball.

His older sister, Terese, was a normal teenager with lots of boyfriends. He was only nine when Terese met her future husband, Jimmy, who showed up one day in a convertible with a rumble seat. Jimmy loved music and knew that Tommy did too. One day, as they were driving downtown to pick up Terese, the song “I Miss You So” by the Cats and the Fiddle came on the radio. Tommy just flipped out over the song. He couldn’t stop talking about it. So Jimmy drove straight to a record store and bought him the record. It was the first record Tommy ever owned. “I remember this,” says Tommy, “as one of the happiest days of my life.”

And then his life changed 180 degrees.

But a month later he started complaining to his mother that when he sat down he would have a hard time standing up. He limped around for a bit, but the next thing you know, he would be out running around, so his mother paid no attention. Gradually, though, over time, the pains came closer together, until one day, he found himself in an altered state of consciousness, apparently floating in a corner of the ceiling, looking down on himself laid out on the couch. He remembers feeling “absolutely great,” the coolest of cools, a number eleven on the scale of one to ten. He had the sensation that there were voices in his presence and they sounded troubled but he couldn’t figure out what was wrong. He was in a coma.

And then, suddenly, he woke up, back in his body, with his brother Henry trying to shove a thermometer in his mouth. Tommy was running a temperature of 104 and was delirious. He passed out again and when he woke up the next morning, he was lying in a pool of sweat; the fever had broken temporarily, but that’s when he really started going downhill.

He was in and out of fevers for days. Nothing could touch it. Not even his Grandmother’s old Sicilian concoction made from bone marrow broth. None of the medicines or therapies worked, and finally they took Tommy to a hospital, where he was diagnosed with a life-threatening staph infection.

A few months before he was struck by the baseball, he had gone into the hospital for a tonsillectomy, where, quite possibly, he had contracted the initial infection that then lay dormant, circulating in the background, until the ball hit him, and then it (the infection) settled in his hip and eventually went raging through his system.

In time, they put a name to his disease: “osteomyelitis,” an infection of the bone. Today it would be treated with surgery and intravenous antibiotics for six weeks. Back then, it took them months just to make the diagnosis and two years more to get it under control.

Until they were able to make the diagnosis, the doctors tried everything. At one point, they thought there was something wrong with the leg itself, so they put him in traction, suspended above the bed in a frame made of steel pipes and canvas. Tommy was forced to lie there with his back and arms on the pipes and an eight-pound weight pulling on his bad leg. It was sheer torture, and it probably did more harm than good. He suffered “that particular version of the Spanish Inquisition” for two months.

Ultimately, penicillin saved his life. It was a new drug, discovered at the end of the Second World War, and for days, they gave him injections in his hip every three hours. When the veins in his hip collapsed, they used the veins in his leg. He never did get any feeling back in his leg where the nerves were destroyed by all those injections.

When they sent him home, his mother set up a bed for him in the sunroom just off the kitchen so she could keep an eye on him. He spent the next two years in that bed. The first year, he was not allowed to leave the house, a kind of a prisoner, and he came to know what it felt like, at ten years old, to be handicapped among other children, “a freak.”

From his bed, he could hear all his friends playing outside, but he couldn’t join them. At one point his parents brought his bed out to the front porch and every so often one of his friends would come over. One day, while he was on the porch yelling to his friends, “Come on over,” he heard one of them say, “I don’t want to go over there. He’s a cripple.” And then another kid said, “No, let’s go over. He’s got great toys.” And they all came over to play with his toys. “I can remember,” Tommy says, “that even though I had heard them say it, and it hurt me deeply, I was so desperate for friendship that I just pretended that I hadn’t.” He believes that this moment—one of the most vivid of his childhood—propelled him to become what he later described as “the nicest guy in the room.” If so, in the ironic way of personal history, it too contributed to his eventual success as a producer.

The days passed into nights and the nights passed into days and nothing was changing. It was relentless, terrible pain; whenever they had to move him, even to change the sheets on the bed, it was excruciating. His only comfort was the little tabletop radio his mother had bought for him. He listened to the adventures of the “The Green Hornet,” “The Shadow,” “The Lux Radio Theatre,” “Fibber McGee and Molly,” “Duffy’s Tavern, where the elite meet.” This little radio had his undivided attention.

And then one night, just by chance, lying in bed, he turned the dial and hit WJMO, the local R&B station. That night, he heard Ruth Brown singing “Mama He Treats Your Daughter Mean,” and a whole new world opened up to him. “It was like she was reaching out to me through that little speaker,” he says. “Just the sound of her voice and the bass and drums; I don’t know exactly what it was about that music, but I felt like it was my best friend. That music saved my life.”

From that moment on, he spent his nights searching for more of the music that moved him so powerfully, having no idea where this emotion was coming from, until much later, when he heard Mahalia Jackson sing Duke Ellington’s “Come Sunday.” Then he realized it all came out of the black church. It was the same soulfulness. He grew to love songs that spoke of overcoming tragedy through a greater caring, songs that “hurt so nice.” “I’ve come to realize,” says Tommy, “that ballads and the blues is where I live.”