The Billy Lee Riley Story
Copyright 1996 Billy Lee Riley
My name is Billy Lee Riley, I was born October 5, 1933 in
Pocohantas, Arkansas. A small rural town in northeast Arkansas in
the foothills of the Ozarks. At the age of three my family moved
from Pocahontas to Osceola, another small rural Arkansas town
founded on the banks of the Mississippi River. Osceola was a
cotton farming town and we moved onto what was once a large
plantation owned by Mr. Hal Jackson. Therefore it's name was
"Jacksonville." The houses on the farm was used as rental
property. If a tenant wanted to live there and work on the farm
his rent was free. But if a tenant preferred working jobs other
than farm work the rent was one dollar per week. My father was a
house painter by trade so he chose to pay the dollar a week rent.
But in the fall and winter months when painting work was scarce,
my dad and my older sister worked in the fields picking cotton.
I learned to play the harmonica at the age of six and my love for
blues music started at that age. Some of my black friends,
playmates and I would go over to the black section of town and
listen to the black blues singers playing on the streets or sit
by the doors of the honky tonks and listen to music from the juke
boxes. Saturday afternoons for most other kids my age was a
Saturday matinee western movie. I did that, too, but most of the
time a Saturday matinee for me was the sound of the blues coming
from the juke boxes at the beer joints.
Hear Billy Lee Riley on Delta Boogie Radio.
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