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   By THOR CHRISTENSEN / The Dallas Morning News


Sam Myers, the Mississippi blues singer and harmonica ace whose career

got a second wind in Texas, died Monday after a yearlong battle with

throat cancer. He was 70.


Mr. Myers died at his home in East Dallas, where he'd lived since 1986

when he left the Delta to join Dallas-based Anson Funderburgh & the

Rockets. Diagnosed with throat cancer in February 2005, he had his

larynx removed in April at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, and had been

recovering at home.


"Sam had his own unique style that people now try to emulate," Mr.

Funderburgh said Monday in a prepared statement.


"His harmonica playing had this hornlike quality to it that made him

sound different than Sonny Boy [Williamson] or Big Walter," said his

friend and collaborator, Brian "Hash Brown" Calway.


"He was a great vocalist and songwriter, too. He'd get up onstage and

make up a song on the spot about some girl who'd just broke his heart

and it would put chills up your neck."


His best-known song was 1956's "Sleeping in the Ground," a gritty

blues noir about a jealous lover that was later recorded by everyone

from Robert Cray to Blind Faith, the British group featuring Steve

Winwood and Eric Clapton. Last year, Mr. Clapton told the Dallas

Morning News , "I'm a big fan of Sam Myers."


Born in 1936 in Laurel, Miss., and raised near Jackson, Mr. Myers

spent most of his life nearly blind, the result of a childhood bout

with cataracts. After teaching himself to play drums, he landed a

scholarship in the early '50s at a music school in Chicago, where he

met Elmore James. He toured with the "Dust My Broom" hit-maker for

nearly a decade and played harmonica on Mr. James' 1961 classic "Look

on Yonder Wall."


"Sleeping in the Ground," a solo hit for Mr. Myers, introduced him to

a new generation of fans in the 1960s and '70s. But like a lot of

1950s bluesmen, Mr. Myers said he was tricked out of his songwriting

royalties.

[Click image for a larger version] File 1997

File 1997

During the time Mr. Myers fronted Anson Funderburgh & the Rockets, the

group won nine W.C. Handy Awards.


"It's a disgusting thing, really," Mr. Myers told The Dallas Morning

News last year. "This is a song I wrote, and I didn't even get a dime

for it, and everybody else is making money with it."


Mr. Funderburgh had been performing "Sleeping in the Ground" for years

when he met Mr. Myers at a concert in Mississippi in 1982. The two

became friends, and when original Rockets singer Darrell Nulisch quit

in 1986, Mr. Myers joined and moved to Dallas.


With the towering, sandpaper-voiced Mr. Myers fronting the group,

Anson Funderburgh & the Rockets put out eight CDs and won nine W.C.

Handy Awards, the blues equivalent of the Grammys. Mr. Myers won for

best harmonica player (1988) and vocalist (1989). He released his

first solo album in May 2004, Coming From the Old School.


Later that year, Mr. Myers, a lifelong smoker, came down with what

doctors originally thought was bronchitis. In February 2005, he was

diagnosed with a malignant polyp in his throat and underwent seven

weeks of radiation treatment. In August, friends staged a benefit

concert featuring Jimmie Vaughan, Delbert McClinton and a brief,

surprise harmonica solo by Mr. Myers. It was one of the last times he

ever performed.


"Sam's one of the last of the old-school blues guys," Mr. McClinton

told the Morning News before the show. "He's out there doing it, night

after night after night, and to me, that's the sign of somebody who

can't get enough of it."


Yet Mr. Myers didn't like to admit how passionate he was about the

blues: "For 50 years, I've looked at music the way I look at working

at the mattress factory in Mississippi where I used to work â you're

just doing a job," he said last year.


He was famous for his gruff exterior, which was partly a way to keep

fans from fawning over him, according to his friends.


"As someone told me earlier today, 'I was blessed to have Sam once

call me an [expletive],' " Mr. Calway said Monday, laughing.


"But he really did have a soft heart. He could be a hard [expletive]

to people, but when you least expected it, he could also be a tender,

gentle guy."


Mr. Myers is survived by a son, a sister, a brother and two

grandchildren. Funeral arrangements are pending.