Pianist, singer and songwriter

Born: November 11, 1927;

Died: November 15, 2016

MOSE Allison, who has died aged 89, was a hugely influential American singer, songwriter and pianist who became the epitome of cool among the burgeoning British blues and R&B schools of the early 1960s. Georgie Fame, Bill Wyman, Van Morrison and many others welcomed him here with awe, and groups including the Kinks, the Who and the Yardbirds recorded or adapted the songs Allison presented on his early albums as a Mississippi bluesman with a sophisticated streak.

Allison had the perfect background for a blues singer. He grew up chopping cotton on his grandfather’s farm just outside Tippo, Mississippi, and when he first began to be heard on the radio he was assumed by many to be a bona fide black blues singer. The great Muddy Waters, on first meeting Allison in Chicago in the 1950s, told him that he had been convinced he had been listening to a fellow African-American singing until then.

Music was all around Allison as a boy. The surrounding area was full of blues folklore. WC Handy, the father of the blues, was reputedly inspired to become a musician after seeing a man playing a guitar with a knife blade in the neighbouring town, Tutwiler, and Parchman Farm, the state penitentiary whose inhabitants included Bukka White, destined to become a legendary figure in the 1960s folk-blues revival, lay just 20 miles away. It later gave its name to Allison’s most covered song.

Allison’s father, John, was running the Tippo general store by the time Mose - or John Jnr as he was then called – came along but before that he had been a professional pianist, playing in the stride style. Mose became fascinated with the piano that his father still played in the front room in his spare time and began picking out melodies at a very young age. Recognising his natural ear, his father sent him to the local church pianist for lessons.

These didn’t last but Mose continued to play by ear and taught himself songs that he heard on the radio and widened his repertoire by learning the Tampa Red, Memphis Minnie, Big Bill Broonzy and Roosevelt Sykes records that were on constant rotation on the jukebox in the local service station, which served as a surrogate youth club.

By his early teens Allison had discovered jazz through hearing Nat ‘King’ Cole’s piano trio on the radio. An older cousin heard him trying to emulate Cole’s style and suggested that Allison also listen to Louis Armstrong, Fats Waller and Earl Hines. Waller’s Hold Tight (Want Some Seafood Mama) was one of the songs Allison played in his first public performance in Charleston, Mississippi. He was still at school at the time and inspired by Armstrong, by now he was also playing trumpet, which he would go on to play during his army service in Fort McLellan, Alabama.

Having learned to write arrangements during a year at the University of Mississippi, Allison formed a band with army colleagues and played at NCO clubs, using his time in the army as an apprenticeship for the club work that would follow. He went on to study for a degree in English and Philosophy at Louisiana State University and on graduating in 1952 he worked as a pianist all over the South before the saxophonist Al Cohn encouraged him to try his luck on the New York jazz scene in 1956.

Within a year he had signed a contract with Prestige Records and released his first album, Back Country Suite. He also recorded with jazz greats Stan Getz, Zoot Sims and Gerry Mulligan while continuing to write songs that drew on his Mississippi roots as well as the influences of jazz masters including John Lewis and Thelonious Monk. He once said that he wrote three kinds of songs: slapstick or fun songs; public service or message songs; and songs that were designed to pull people out of a slump. Whatever his intention, his output invariably ended up as entertaining.

On the concert stage, which he far preferred to the recording studio, he was unfailingly witty and sardonic. Ahead of his Glasgow Jazz Festival concert in 2010, which was to be one of his last appearances in the UK, he told The Herald that he liked the immediacy of live performance and found it as challenging and rewarding then as he did when he had begun 60 years before.

He also revealed that, unlike some other artists, he was happy to keep revisiting his back catalogue. He said one song in particular, Your Mind is on Vacation, which Elvis Costello covered, had even changed its target over the years.

"I used to say that it was written for some people in an audience who just didn't want to listen and kept talking all the way through a gig," he said. "Then I thought, no, it's about our politicians - and it could be about them again any time soon - but actually I think it might describe ... me. I often find myself thinking, Mose, your mind is on vacation but your mouth is working overtime."

He kept himself fit, jogging, swimming and cycling into his eighties and he was always grateful to his British fan club, especially Pete Townshend, Van Morrison and Georgie Fame who recorded the Tell Me Something tribute album in 1999, and Elvis Costello, who recorded Allison’s Everybody's Cryin' Mercy and Your Mind is on Vacation, for keeping his name circulating and some royalties arriving.

Costello also sang Allison’s Monsters of the Id, with the composer on piano, as a duet with Allison’s daughter, singer-songwriter Amy Allison for her album Sheffield Streets on one of Allison’s last trips to the recording studio.

Allison died at home in Hilton Head Island, South Carolina. He is survived by his wife, Audre, daughters Amy, Janine and Alissa, and son John.

ROB ADAMS