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 JP Soars has been playing music for a long time, because that’s all he ever wanted to do.
When I asked if it’s truly been music all along, he answered simply: “Absolutely.”
I caught up with him in between tours and he told me a story that began with happy memories of family life:
“My name is John Paul Soars. I was born in Anaheim, CA in 1969.
“My parents were into all kinds of music, especially my mom. She loved The Beatles. I think I heard The Beatles in the Womb. My dad played guitar, not professionally, but he played at home for fun and we had friends that would come over and jam. They were into Neil Young and Bob Dylan. They played a lot of those old songs. There’s one band in particular, the Ozark Mountain Daredevils. They had a record and my parents would play it all the time. The hit was ‘If You Want to Get to Heaven.’ But there was another song on there called “Chicken Train” which we were all into.
“My mother’s family was from Arkansas. My folks went out there to visit my mom’s grandfather. My dad fell in love with Arkansas. He grew up in Anaheim and didn’t want to raise his kids in that city, so they found a place in Arkansas for $25.00 a month, an old farmhouse and about 25 acres of land. It was up near Fort Smith. We grew up in a little town called Cedarville, Arkansas, which is way up there in the Ozark mountains. That’s where I grew up and was raised from the time I was three until I was sixteen. I graduated the 10th grade there and then my parents moved us to Florida in 1985. We moved to West Palm Beach, and that was quite a cultural shock going from a school where you knew the same twenty -five kids from kindergarten to a school where my graduating class was over 500 kids. My dad was a carpenter and my mom raised seven kids. I’m the oldest of seven. My mom had me when she was very young. My mom was 17 and my dad was 19 when they had me, so we’re close to each other in ages. They were hippies. I was never rebellious against my parents. They were essentially rebels themselves I guess”.
The move to the Sunshine State was a huge change, but in hindsight it proved to be a smart one.
“A lot of the friends I had back in Arkansas got into trouble after I left. My parents had pretty much reached the end financially and weren’t able to make a living up there. They moved down here to Florida so they could find work and it was definitely a good move.
JP showed an affinity for playing music at a very young age
 One day my parents came home with the Kiss ‘Love Gun’ record. I loved it, but I didn’t have a record player, so I just sat and looked at that thing. I was in 4th grade when they got it. So I was probably 9. I just sat there and looked at that record for months because I didn’t have anything to play it. My uncle moved in with us and he had a record player! I remember putting the needle on it and just going, ‘Oh my God, this is the greatest thing in the world.’ I wanted to be a drummer. I wanted to play drums. I thought the guitar was too hard. It had too many strings and frets and all those things that were too complicated. I wanted to play drums. I set up Tupperware boxes and stuff and pots and pans and beat on them.”
It wouldn’t be too long before the guitar came into his life:
The Kid Stays
“When I was eleven my dad started showing me some chords on the guitar and whatever he showed me I could just play. He would show me something, then I was ‘OK, OK, OK, now show me something else.’ He started showing me songs like ‘House of the Rising Sun,’ ‘Down by the River,’ all those sorts of things. He had friends that would come over and jam with him and they were playing in bands. I was about thirteen or fourteen. My mom was working as a cocktail waitress in a club that had bands in Fort Smith (Arkansas). She told the guys, ‘Hey, my son plays guitar’. So, they said:
‘Well bring him out and let him sit in with us.’
“I learned a couple of tunes, sat down with them and it was life changing. It blew my mind. I was not a little kid anymore. It was a hell of an experience. This was something I could do that no one else in my class could do. That’s just so cool and that was it. Ever since, I knew music was what I wanted to do. I never had much interest in anything else. I put a lot of effort into it, but it seemed to kind of come natural to me, the ability to learn. My dad could have played professionally if he wanted. But he chose the path of raising seven kids.”
Happy Times:
Although his folks struggled financially, there was a lot of joy and happiness whether they were playing music or listening to “The Chicken Train.”
He remembers:
“I would sit around. Watch my daddy play and watched his buddies come over and they would have parties and I would just sit there and listen to them play and tell stories. Everyone was laughing and smoking and having such a good time. I was just mesmerized by all of that. You know, I always associated music and those gatherings with such happy times in my household. My folks weren’t arguing and stuff. You know, my dad was playing guitar and he was in a good mood. So, I kind of associate that with happy times and good times. My parents were kids themselves. They were essentially figuring out along the way. They were these long-haired hippie freaks living in Cedarville, AR with a bunch of farmers. My best friend’s dad was the Farmer of the Year in the state of Arkansas! I grew up around cow fields and straw hats and very, very conservative families, and here my parents were with their hippie buddies. They were not conservative. They were quite the opposite.”
 The move to Florida would also offer more unexpected (and life changing) opportunities.
In the Presence of the King
“When I was 18 years old. I put my name in a raffle at a music store in Florida. I won a guitar and two tickets to see B.B. King play. I got to meet him backstage and he signed the guitar. That B.B. King concert changed my life. I left there thinking this is music that touches everybody, that I can keep playing when I’m sixty or seventy years old. The Blues is music that I could play for my grandmother and she would appreciate it. She probably wouldn’t like Metallica and some of the other stuff I’m playing. With this kind of stuff, I can play for anybody. This is timeless music that just cuts straight to my soul. My dad and I left that concert that night. I left thinking, ‘This is the kind of stuff I need to learn how to play.’”
“I knew it, but I had no idea how to do it because I’m self-taught. It wasn’t a particular song, you know, but meeting B.B. King like that just changed everything. He was the kindest person I ever met. What also struck me wasn’t just the music, it was how he spoke to me when I met him and how he sat down and signed my guitar and he said, ‘This is an awfully pretty guitar, you sure you want me to sign it?’ He was just so humble and down to earth. And I thought, wow, this is a legend. This is a living legend, he’s speaking to me as though we had known each other for years. He’s not making me feel stupid. He’s not up there on the pedestal. I’ll never, ever forget that.
It was in West Palm Beach at the Carefree Theater”.
Full Speed Ahead
For most musicians there’s a crossroads. At some point there’s a career choice between music and more conventional employment with guaranteed paychecks and retirement benefits. The choice often involves heated family arguments and parental disapproval. However, in JP’s case, the folks realized early on that he had talent, and for him there was never any question.
“I did all kinds of work. But I just wanted to make a living playing music. That was always my goal. I did all kinds of stuff. When we got to Florida, my dad got me a job with a painting contractor. They were building homes, and I did that one summer so I could buy myself some Reeboks and whatever else. I worked all kinds of jobs, but you know, I was always playing in bands at the same time. When I was twenty, I joined the first, what I consider, “real” band. These guys had been practicing. They had their stuff together; all original songs and they were playing gigs. It was a metal band doing super heavy stuff. We practiced 4 nights a week in the sweaty warehouse and we’d go play on the weekends and be lucky if we made 100 bucks. The whole band had a gig which we would use to pay money for our warehouse rent, so I never made any money. I was twenty when I started with that band and about twenty-six when the band dissolved.
“There was a lot of discipline in that band. We practiced 4 nights a week. It was all original, all worked out and structured. I learned a good deal about discipline and how to work on stuff to get it tight, you know, precise.
 “By then I’d started going to Blues jams, after seeing B.B. King. I didn’t know how to play it but I was interested in it. When the heavy metal band dissolved in 96. I started the Blues band. I was worried about what I would do if the music didn’t work out. I went to electronics school and got a degree in electronics. I got a job at Motorola. I wasn’t making any money at the time, just playing with the hopes of getting signed. Sometime around ’97, I met this French guy who had studied at the Conservatory in France. He knew lots of chords and a bunch of stuff I didn’t know, so I latched onto him and absorbed as much as I could. He moved out to LA to go to the Musicians Institute and kept telling me you’ve got to move out here, you should come out, there’s tons of musicians. So I packed up my little Volkswagen Fox and a trailer and towed it out there and of course, it broke down in Pascagoula Ms. It coasted into a rest stop, I called a tow truck, ditched the trailer. Got a U-Haul box truck and a trailer to put the car in. I arrived in LA with a broke down car and a box truck at 10:00 at night and I remember thinking what the f-ck have I done?
He learned a lot but LA wasn’t quite the right fit, the musicians he met at the school knew lots of chords but had trouble playing a basic shuffle, so he decided to move back to Florida, and then something else happened.
Right before he left for Los Angeles, back in Florida JP recorded a seven-song demo with the metal band Divine Empire. Three months after he barely settled out west, the phone started ringing. Apparently, the bass player had sent the Divine Empire tape around to some small labels, and there had been a couple of offers to record and tour for them.
For JP, this was a chance to jump on the chicken train.
“I still had my stuff in the apartment out there in L.A. So, I rented out my room to someone else, went back to Florida, recorded the record and did the tour. I love touring. It was like, ‘I feel like a real musician. I can focus solely on music for the month I’m out there on the road.’ So that went on for about a year and a half. I would fly back to Florida, do a tour with the guys and then go back to LA and get another job. So after about a year and a half, I just said I’m going back to Florida full time. I missed my family and my friends. I moved to Boca Raton because the drummer in the metal band had a girlfriend who had a friend who had a house that would rent me a room for like 50 bucks or whatever I could afford to pay. So that was in 1999 and I’ve been in Boca Raton ever since.”
The Blues Came Knockin’
Although he enjoyed the touring and growing as a musician, there was an itch that needed to be scratched.
He continues:
“Ok, so now it’s the year 2000 and I started playing with a Blues band down here called The Shadow Casters. I got introduced to the South Florida Blues Society and going to all these jams I wouldn’t put any metal stuff in there. I wouldn’t even tell the guys I was still playing in the metal band till later down the road.
 “I was doing both simultaneously. I would go on the road with the band now called Divine Empire. We recorded five albums, we toured Europe, we toured Canada, we toured the States many times, and still didn’t make any money. When I come home from a tour after being out for three weeks, I might have 6 or 700 bucks in my pocket. It was a great time, but in the back of my mind then I knew I wanted to play Blues. The people from the Blues society were encouraging, at the time, I wasn’t singing and they had talked me into singing and doing my own thing and just play with as many people as possible, try to absorb everything.
In 2005, I met Terry Hanck.”
Graduate Studies
There’s an old saying: “When the time is right, the teacher will appear.”
That saying would manifest itself for JP in the form of Terry Hanck.
Hanck was a veteran sax player and band leader who played with Elvin Bishop and had given career starts to such outstanding players as Christoffer “Kid” Andersen. His influence on JP was enormous; when I asked if he was the primary influence in those years, once again, the answer was:
“Absolutely.”
The former heavy metal disciple tells me: “I started backing him up, and I learned a ton of stuff from him. I consider him a mentor. He taught me how to structure the show and taught me a ton of cool music too. I had a huge growing experience playing with Terry and learning his material and stuff.”
There were others on the South Florida scene as well.
“The first one was a guy named Billy Burns. I played with him for a while. We just recently had a celebration for him. He passed away about four months ago, he was a harmonica player. He turned me on to all kinds of stuff. He said: ‘You need to get yourself a little Princeton AM and get a hollow body guitar. Start playing the hollow body, you need smaller amps.’ And he just turned me on to Hollywood Fats and Junior Watson, all that West Coast groove. I learned so much from Billy. He even taught me what to wear, dress pants and stuff like that, separate yourself from the crowd. There was a third one, his name was Roger Ouellette. He was a singer down here and he had the Shadow Casters. Through him is where I met Billy Burns and the whole South Florida Blues Society. There was a guy named Doctor Lee who had a band called Doctor Lee and the Regulators, and he was also harmonica player and singer. I learned a lot from him, too. Roger became like the older brother I never had. He’s a couple years older than me and he turned me on to a lot of cool stuff, but most importantly introduced me to Billy Burns. Another person who helped me a lot at the time was Dar Lopez. She had a popular Blues radio show, I’d go in there in the mornings, on Sunday mornings and play on the radio station. She turned me on to Jessie Mae Hemphill, who I got to meet through her.
 Jessie Mae
Jessie Mae Hemphill was a legendary guitarist and singer. She was the last in a long line of blues guitar women like Memphis Minnie.
JP remembers:
Dar told me. “I’ve got this guitar that I got from Gibson for Jesse Mae Hemphill and I want to drive it to Mississippi to give it to her for her birthday. I’m going up there with Jim Nestor. Do you want to come up and do the trip with us?”
JP answered: “Absolutely.” He goes on to add:
“There was a guy out here named James, I can’t remember his last name. He was from Alabama, taking care of her because she’d had a stroke. She was in the wheelchair. He played guitar in the new-to-me tuning that she used. He knew a bunch of her material and stuff. So we were there for like five days and I got to hang out with her for the whole time. She had all kind of crazy stories. I remember her sitting in her little wheelchair. It was one of those electric motor scooters and she had this little dog, Sweet Pea sat in her lap the whole time we were there. She liked green tea. She had a bunch of empty cans of it she collected and that was her favorite thing. So anyway, she’s sitting there with her scooter and a little bag. Then she pulls out a derringer and she holds it up and says ‘I’ll shoot a man in a minute!’
“And she had a National guitar, and it had a hole in it. She said:
“I shot a hole through it. I thought a man was sneaking in my window, so I shot at him and I shot a hole through the guitar. But that’s alright. There’s just more room for the air to flow in and out of.”
“She was totally a trip. She told me about how B.B. King wanted to marry her. It was an amazing experience.
The Cigar Box Guitar
He remembers an important music lesson he learned from the visit to Jessie Mae.
“When we went to visit Jesse Mae, there was that guy there helping her out. He showed me the open tuning she used on the guitar and the picking method with the thumb and finger. So for six months after that, I focused on her stuff and tried to learn as much as I could. And it came in real handy when I got the Cigar Box guitar in 2008 because I was applying the same picking method I had learned from Jesse Mae, I applied it to the Cigar Box Guitar and man, oh man, that’s that real Hill Country sound. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
2009 IBC
“Up until 2009 we were only playing in Florida with the band, and then I saw the folks that had won that Blues challenge, and suddenly, they’re playing festivals. I knew there were twelve or so festivals you’d automatically get on if you won the IBC challenge. So we entered and we won the International Blues Challenge in 2009. And that was a pivotal moment, it got us out of Florida and on the international scene. That opened a ton of doors. It wasn’t like somebody just said, ‘OK, here you go. These guys are gonna call you’. No, no, it was a list of festivals and OK, I had to find out who to contact and who books them. But now I could say: “Hey, we’re the guys that won the IBC and we want to come play.”
 The Train Keeps A Rollin’
From the family jam sessions in Arkansas to the next tour on the calendar, he plays it forward and doesn’t stay still too long.“I’ve never really had any musical low points, I’ve had personal ones like everyone, but I try to set little goals and move forward in small increments. The fact that I’ve been able to parlay this into a career for me has been huge because I didn’t start making a living at it till I was well into my mid 30’s. There have been some real high points. The first Legendary Rhythm and Blues cruise would have been one of them. I’d never been on a cruise before. I made lifelong acquaintances and friends from that cruise. “On the other side of the coin there were a few strange ones. The weirdest was one that we did with (the band) Southern Hospitality in Slovakia. It was June 2012 or 2013. We played a gig in a cash register museum. It was all glass with mirrors and cash registers. They lined up single file, Damon and I on one side and then the other guys on the other side of the wall. We had to sort of set up in line and you can imagine what the sound was like all glass and cash registers. It was bizarre. Oh well they sure had a good time, and I rec we did too”.
Brick by Brick
JP’s most recent recording serves as a musical menu with a wide variety of influences and personal statements. A few of the highlights include:
“Brick by Brick”-The title song lets us know that his metal influences have not been forgotten and jumps right with them.
“Jezebel”- Reminds me of “Love Potion Number Nine.”
“In The Moment”- Recorded on an iPhone unbeknownst to JP!
“Merlin Stomp”- I hear that train rolling groove and I can’t help but believe that the Ozark Mt. Daredevils and those family jam sessions still have an influence on the young man from Cedarville.
The whole album never becomes repetitive or predictable and shows J.P. Soars to be able to step outside the “Blues” genre without stumbling.
Sitting on the Back Porch
A final question: “Years from now when you’re sitting on the back porch, watching the sunset and looking back on this great career you’ve been blessed and able to do, what are you gonna feel have been your greatest accomplishments?
He says:” Being able to do what I love for a living, making music was something that I’ve known from the time I was five years old that I wanted to do. That’s all I’ve ever wanted to do. Hopefully I’ll be doing it when I’m sitting on that back porch, and I’ll have another gig lined up.”
Judging by his progress so far, will the Chicken Train keep rolling?
“Absolutely.”
Writer Rev. Billy C. Wirtz is a performing artist, teacher and radio personality and recovering addict. He is a former Special ED Teacher and Pro wrestling manager. The Rev is the author of two books and numerous articles on music and culture. He lives in Florida with his wife and a houseful of animals.
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