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Donald's Encyclopedia of Popular MusicA B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y ZPENA, Paul(b 26 January 1950, Hyannis Massachusetts; d 1 October 2005, San Francisco, of pancreatitis and diabetes) Singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist. He was born with congenital glaucoma and attended schools for the blind. His grandparents were from the Cape Verde Islands off the west coast of Africa; his father was a professional musician. He picked up piano, guitar, upright bass and violin, appearing at the Newport Folk Festival in 1969, and a folk-blues album was issued on Capitol in 1971. Pena played guitar with such bluesmen as John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, Mississippi Fred McDowell and T-Bone Walker; his song 'Jet Airliner' was a top ten hit by the Steve Miller Band in the 1970s, but Pena's own second album, New Train, made in 1973 and including the hit, was not released until 2000 on account of the squabbling of talent manager Albert Grossman, putting quite a crimp in Pena's career. He lived mostly on income from the hit while suffering from poor health all his life. In the late 1980s he heard a short-wave radio broadcast from Moscow of Tuvan multi-harmonic throat-singing, and spent several years tracking it down. In the 1990s he made himself an authority on it, winning a singing competition in Tuva's capital city Kyzyl in 1995 and becoming fast friends with Kongar-ol Ondar, one of its leading artists. He was a celebrity in Tuva, just north of Mongolia, known as 'Earthquake' for his deep voice. Back Tuva Future in 1999 was an uneven crossover album, with elements of throat-singing, blues, country and even hip-hop. An award-winning film Ghengis Blues was an account of one of his trips to Asia, with a soundtrack album available on Six Degrees in 2000. |