Which road to take is determined by the pull of the vocals. Michael Shipp's muddy growl points the listener toward the road marked by the flattened third and seventh of the blue notes. His voice lays a syncopated melodic line that points straight towards the true south 12 bar blues.

Michael R Shipp was born in the Land of Opportunity during a time when opportunities barely had squatter's rights. In his boyhood hometown of Blytheville, opportunities were born from the fertile delta soil where agriculture was king. For Big Daddy, opportunity's king was born 69 miles to the south in Memphis where the sounds of Sam and Dave, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, Albert King and Jerry Lee Lewis held court in such palaces as Sun Studios and Stax/Volt Records.

Shipp's first real guitar was a borrowed Epiphone Frontier that was purchased in Memphis. This guitar became an acoustic cathedral in which young Michael sought sanctuary from the outside world; as he grew older, the guitar became less of a place to escape to and more of a place to go. He points at this guitar as being the one thing that helped maintain his interest in music when other interests sidetracked him. Nearly every song he writes is worked out on the Epi and it has always been a major part of Michael's music.

The Frontier guitar wasn't the only thing Shipp borrowed early in his musical development. When he was a shy fifth grader, he used a borrowed electric guitar, microphone, and Fender amp to perform his own rewritten version of "Folsum Prison Blues" for the giggling guests at his sister's birthday party. Michael's version of the song dealt with his dislike of school ("I hear the bus a' comin'" was the lonesome refrain) and the template of this song gave him his first taste of Johnny Cash's unique musical style, which still influences Shipp today.

The Shipp family moved down the highway a couple hundred miles to the Little Rock area, not far from the State Hospital for Nervous Diseases. It was there that Michael began to shape his style as a musician. The Stones and the Animals formed the foundation by introducing him to the blues.

"Those guys turned me on to the blues even though the blues were invented right in my own backyard," Shipp says. "The John Lee Hooker tunes the Animals did always stuck with me even when I didn't have a clue who John Lee Hooker was." Michael saw inspiration in local heroes like Black Oak Arkansas; he soon began to absorb the vibes handed down from John Lee, Muddy Waters, Albert, Freddie and BB King. The girl next door gave him Johnny Winter's album "Still Alive and Well" and "that introduced me to the three piece sound."

Johnny rocked. Michael listened. The metamorphosis into Big Daddy had begun.

As little league teams groom interested young players for bigger things, high school garage bands do the same for musicians. On little league teams the youngest and most inexperienced players are relegated to the outfield; in high school garage bands they get stuck playing the bass.

"I always played bass," Michael says "and I became very accomplished on it. It really taught me a lot about music structure."

Later, however, people began to take notice of the tall teenager's development on the guitar and he began to focus more on that instrument. That was when he met Goldie.

Goldie is a 1968 Les Paul. She was acquired from a guy in Little Rock who never played her much. For Michael it was love at first sight and as in any good union, the pair soon became inseparable. Goldie wasted no time in bonding with her new partner. Shipp wasted no time in trusting her. By the time he graduated from high school, he and Goldie already had the style that would mark his career: Less is more as loud as possible. Big Daddy was ready to hit the road.