Jerry Lawson at Musical Instrument Museum

Lawson was raised in the tiny country town of Apopka, Florida, about twelve miles north of Orlando. Lawson’s uncle, Booker T. Washington, owned a juke join in Apopka named the Two Spot, and he and his mom lived in the apartment upstairs in his early years. Summers were spent with family in Philadelphia, where he got to hear music that wasn’t played on the radio in the South. After high school Lawson moved to New York City where he met the members of what would later become the Persuasions in 1962. The fabled a capella quintet went on to an astonishing career of forty years and over twenty albums....

read more

Lawson was raised in the tiny country town of Apopka, Florida, about twelve miles north of Orlando. Lawson’s uncle, Booker T. Washington, owned a juke join in Apopka named the Two Spot, and he and his mom lived in the apartment upstairs in his early years. Summers were spent with family in Philadelphia, where he got to hear music that wasn’t played on the radio in the South. After high school Lawson moved to New York City where he met the members of what would later become the Persuasions in 1962. The fabled a capella quintet went on to an astonishing career of forty years and over twenty albums.

In 2002 Lawson retired from the Persuasions and from a capella and took a job working with developmentally disabled adults at the Tungland Corporation in Phoenix, Arizona. Before long he was singing in Phoenix clubs with jazz combos and bands. It was while considering plans to record an album of standards in Russia with the Moscow Philharmonic that his wife Julie put him in touch with the San Francisco-based a capella group Talk of the Town. The group had essentially honed its skills by studying, you guessed it, Lawson’s arrangements for the Persuasions. When Lawson casually sang with them at a wedding, the fit was too perfect to resist.

There followed what Lawson considers the masterpiece album of his a capella career—Jerry Lawson & Talk of The Town. A call from Rod Stewart invited all to join him on Shelter from the Storm, a fundraiser to help the survivors of Hurricane Katrina. Jerry and TOTT went on to perform with the best up-and-coming a capella groups in the country on NBC’s the Sing Off where they were duly hailed as grand masters of the genre.

For Lawson, the old Persuasions motto, “Still Ain’t Got No Band” went out the window in 2014 with a brand new album set for release in 2015. After an astounding fifty years in the music business at the age of seventy-one, musical dreams continue to come true for this one-time kid from a juke joint in Apopka, Florida.

show less