"Anyway, that's just some of the stuff," the soul-blues singer Mighty Sam McClain said to me in a recent phone interview. "You're a good listener."

He'd been talking, nonstop, for 31 minutes, responding to the simplest of opening questions: "What have you been up to?" After the compliment he paid me, he chattered for another 39 minutes, with just a few questions to prompt him.

Admittedly, the man has a lot to talk about.

He left his home in Louisiana at age 13 to escape an abusive stepfather. "He hit me a couple times," McClain said. "He hit me in the head with a hammer. Once. Then he hit me with a walking stick. So I was getting ready to kill him. I really was. He was a hunter. And there were guns all over the house. ... I thought about doing it."

Instead, he said, "I crawled out the window, and I didn't look back."

He then hooked up with Little Melvin Underwood, initially as a roadie and by age 15 - in the late 1950s - as a singer.