Macy Blackman was born in Wilmington, Delaware in 1948. He became aware of music in 1951, right around the time his grandfather started teaching him the piano. He spent his summers in Newport News, Virginia so he was exposed to both music from Philly and music from Virginia, country and southern r ’n b. The first thing he remembers trying to play was Bill Haley’s “Crazy Man Crazy”. In 1959, he met other Delaware precocious pre-teens who were also starting to play rock and roll (basically folk music of its day). By the end of 1960 he turned professional and by the Cuban Missile Crisis was playing two or three night a week, a lot for a ninth grader. He played in the first racially integrated band in Delaware, the Teen Kings and the in the second integrated band, Ron Smith and the Evergreens. He was fortunate enough to play with the Orlons, a south Philly group with lots of great hit records. He moved to NYC in 1966 and got into a classic rock group in which he played cornet. In 1974, his parents moved to Florida and he obtained his piano from his childhood. After a year of practice, he started playing solo piano in Greenwich Village Clubs and was working every night for years. (He is also a piano technician and teacher). Then in 1982, the Rockin ’Rebels were formed. They had an all-star line-up and worked 300 to 320 gigs a year for the next 14 years. After this, Macy was burned out and took some enforced time off. Then he received an offer from U.C. Berkeley to teach musicology courses at their adult extension so he moved to SF in 2000. The Mighty Fines were formed in 2003 and they continue to be his focus to the present day, along with tuning and teaching.

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