One of the true successful survivors in the local music scene, Mean Gene Kelton has a career with blues roots as deep as they go, ups and downs that translate to the best of blues lyrics and an unsuspected path that led to fame as one of the very first Internet music heroes. Forest Gump has nothing on this man! 

     Mean Gene's experience literally dates to birth. Vague memories combined with his mother's recollections tell a story of a young childhood in the heart and soul of blues country. "Music was never without me," Mean Gene says. "I spent the first six years of my life on a plantation in Charleston, Mississippi. My dad played music around our house and my first stepfather played guitar with Harold Jenkins, who later became a big star known as Conway Twitty. On the plantation, several families lived in one house and I was awoken every day with the local dawn to dusk AM radio station giving the farm reports and playing bluegrass music. It was called hillbilly music back then. But I also started hearing the early rock stuff from artists like Elvis, Chuck Berry and Little Richard."

     "Of course, Mississippi was the home of the earliest and best blues. A few years later when I started playing guitar my mother said she thought a lot of my guitar style came from those days we lived in Mississippi. On the plantation were many African American sharecroppers. These were still the days of the segregated South. My family supervised many of these families. At the end of the work week the sharecroppers would gather at the community store. There was always a music jam going on. The played everything - spoons, buckets, the bench, they were lucky if they had one guitar to play!"

     "On Sundays, we would go to the black juke joint called Elmer Greens. The parking lot was paved with bottle tops and the floor was dirt packed as hard as concrete. Because they worked for us, we were the only white family allowed to attend. But even then, the blacks would dance and then on the next song they would clear the floor and we would dance, but we would never dance together."

     "It was then off to Texas, where I was like a lot of kids when The Beatles hit and everyone wanted to be in a band. I started playing when I was 10 and when I was16, I was in my first cover band, The Moving Shadows in Liberty, Texas. We were more eclectic than most of these bands playing everything from Johnny Cash to Three Dog Night, Rare Earth and Buck Owens. It was off to Houston next where I had a band called Fire Creek and we were going to be the next best thing. We were doing pretty well, but life changed. I got married and needed a day job."

     "I was still a young buck and kept playing, often getting only one or two hours of sleep. But I wasn't into drugs like a lot of the musicians and eventually that scene, family, no sleep, all became too much and I quit. I spent ten years doing nothing more than playing in weekend-warrior bands from time to time. By, 1983 I had a new wife and worked at K-Buck radio in Baytown. The economy in Houston at the time sucked and I got laid off. My wife accused me of doing this on purpose so I could start playing again. I told her, "Look - they laid off the whole station!

     "But, whatever, I couldn't get a job and needed to do something. I took the Telecaster out and headed to the City Club in Baytown. I tried to convince the owner to let me play for tips. He said it was a country bar, but agreed to give it a try. I was soon making $100 a night in tips playing all over Baytown and Clear Lake almost every night. This was pretty good money back then. I added a drum machine and did even better as a one man band. By 1991, I was ready to form a full band and went back to the country bar in Baytown to see if I could start a Wednesday Blues Jam. The owner said I was pretty good, but basically that style of music was preferred by a different skin color. I told him some of the hottest music in Texas was Stevie Ray Vaughn and The Fabulous Thunderbirds and that Eric Clapton was about as popular as anyone. He gave in and we packed the place for 55 weeks in a row. The jam eventually moved to Frankie's in Baytown and was a main stay for a few more years.

      "I then hosted the blues jam and played a lot at Billy Blues on Richmond Avenue. I had been called Mean Gene a little through the years, but this is where it stuck. I was in the dressing room with Joe Guitar when Johnny Clyde Copeland walked in. Joe said, 'Johnny, I want you to meet Gene Kelton, he play a mean guitar.' Johnny responded with a big smile, 'Well, Mean Gene, glad to meet you.' I became Mean Gene! My longtime band name, The Diehards derived from playing a daytime summer gig on The Flamingo Club, which was a floating bar on Clear Lake. We had to play in the sun so that the customers could sit in the shade. A few of them said you must be a bunch of diehards to suffer through this heat!"

     Like a lot of strong regional artists, Mean Gene has had some moderate success with recordings. His first CD "Most Requested" which contains his legendary novelty songs "The Texas City Dyke" and "My Baby Don't Wear No Panties" still outsells his later two, "Going Back to Memphis: A Biker Band Tribute to Elvis" and "Mean Guitar." But it took the Internet and mp3.com to make Mean Gene a worldwide sensation.

     "Entering the new millennium, I was now married to Joni, who was a computer whiz. I was amazed with all the technology stuff. We then get wind of an electronica musician who was the rage of the new mp3 download craze. It turned out he was right here in Houston. He told me people were downloading his music from all over the world thousands of time a day! He said he would put my music up on mp3.com for a $100. I handed him a hundred dollar bill. Before you knew it I had several songs high on the main chart and literally everything I posted on one chart or another. We ended up with 750,000 downloads! Although the website only paid three cents a download, I still made $21,000! Of course, all the legal battles started and mp3.com was history, but it was a wild ride while it lasted. A musician today needs to take advantage of all of the technology."

     Mean Gene Kelton will be hosting The Southern Fried 4th of July Picnic and Music Festival at the Hawg Stop Amphitheater on Sheldon Road in Houston, Texas on Saturday, July 4. Besides Mean Gene and the Diehards, bands scheduled to play include The 4-Barrel Ramblers, Clovis, Brother2Brother and The Beat Daddys.