One of the most respected musicians to ever call San Diego home, Sam Hinton has also had one of the most varied and impressive resumes you’re likely to come across. This month Hinton releases a new disc of his incomparable music, “Master of the Solo Diatonic Harmonica,” featuring a whopping 120 tunes and stories across two CDs. The culmination of a life-long love affair with music, the album is a treasure-trove of Americana, taking in numerous folk music genres, and still managing to only capture a fraction of Hinton’s immense musical knowledge.
The La Jollan will celebrate his 89th birthday this Friday, March 31.
Hinton was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma on March 31, 1917, and was instantly attracted to music. At the age of 5 he received his first musical instrument ” a harmonica. He quickly became adept on the instrument, and for his eighth birthday, his grandfather gave him an accordion. Young Sam soon added pennywhistle to his musical arsenal and performed in public at every opportunity. After his family relocated to Beaumont, Texas, the 9-year-old Sam entered a contest at the Strand Theatre in Tulsa in 1926, coming in second and winning the princely sum of $2.
It’s important to note that in addition to his musical bent, Hinton also had a keen interest in natural history, especially animals. It was when he moved to Crockett, Texas, at the age of 12 that his two hobbies, zoology and folk music, came together in an unusual fashion. His search for reptiles to study led him to rural areas, which directly exposed him to local black churches. There, he learned many of his earliest tunes.
At the age of 17, Hinton acquired his first guitar and began to work on his patented syncopated style. He would go on to work his way through college as a sign-painter, calligrapher and scientific illustrator, as well as a musician and supplier of snake venom to a pharmaceutical firm in Pennsylvania.
In 1948, he began teaching at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), and soon made his commercial/major label debut. In 1950 he signed with the small California label ABC Eagle, releasing a number of singles, notably “Old Man Atom” (aka “Talkin’ Atom Blues”). When New York deejay Martin Block played the song on his “Make Believe Ballroom” radio show, the response from listeners prompted Columbia Records to acquire the rights to the recording and re-issue it, scoring a sizeable jukebox hit in the process. As the San Diego Union reported that year, ” “¦ four nickels out of every five deposited in tavern jukeboxes produce Hinton’s dolorous ditty.”
Today Hinton is retired, having made his final public performance on May 11, 2002, at the 14th annual San Diego Folk Heritage Festival. In his nearly seven decades as a performer and scientist, he’s given thousands of concerts in Europe and North America, written three books on marine biology, hosted a 13-part television series on folk music and produced more than 1,200 installments of a weekly newspaper feature called “The Ocean World.” And that’s still just scratching the surface. While his new album will certainly add to his legacy, Hinton has already accomplished more in his lifetime than most of us could even dream of, a true renaissance man.
