Legendary jazz guitarist, singer and songwriter George Benson joined host Kenneth Womack to talk about what makes a hit record, how he became friends with Paul McCartney, his new album “Dreams Do Come True” and much more on the sixth season finale of “Everything Fab Four,” a podcast co-produced by me and Womack (a music scholar who also writes about pop music for Salon) and distributed by Salon.
Benson, the 10-time Grammy Award winner known for such songs as “On Broadway,” “Breezin’” and “Give Me the Night,” was considered a musical prodigy as a child, though at the time his hands were “too small” to play the guitar. As he told Womack, his stepfather instead taught him to play the ukulele at age seven, and soon he was playing on the street corners of his hometown of Pittsburgh. “Everybody got to know Little Georgie Benson,” he said. And when he went to school, where “there were 1,400 white students and 30 Blacks,” he was called on every time music was needed for a school event.
