Murray

Sims and Patton were good with friends with each other as youths living in Renova (an all-black community 3 miles north of Cleveland, Mississippi).

Sims was born on August 22, 1890 in the Delta town of Anguilla. He started out playing piano, and eventually also learned to play guitar, bass viol, violin and mandolin. He learned to play violin from his maternal grandfather Warren Scott, a slave who had been raised in Baltimore and Maryland.

Sims played as a string band musician from sometime between 1919 and 1922, when he met up with a guitarist called Percy Thomas in a Clarksdale barrelhouse, and later recruited mandolin player, Louis Ford, and bass player, 'Pitty Pat'. They played together for twenty years, first as the Mississippi Corn Shuckers and later as the Son Sims Four.

Brian