John Paul Larkin (March 13, 1942 – December 3, 1999), better known by his stage name Scatman John (sometimes credited as Scatman internationally), was an American jazz musician and poet w . .   Expand    Wikipedia

John Paul Larkin (March 13, 1942 – December 3, 1999), better known by his stage name Scatman John (sometimes credited as Scatman internationally), was an American jazz musician and poet who created a fusion of scat singing and dance music, best known for his 1994 hit "Scatman (Ski Ba Bop Ba Dop Bop)". As John also stuttered, he liked to say, this was a process of "turning my biggest problem into my biggest asset". He has sold millions of recordings worldwide and was named "Best New Artist" in the Echo Awards in both Japan and Germany. He was a recipient of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association's Annie Glenn Award for outstanding service to the stuttering community and was inducted into the United States National Stuttering Association Hall of Fame. Born in El Monte, California, he suffered from a severe stammer "since started talking," which led to an emotionally traumatic childhood. Even at the peak of his success in 1995, journalists reported that during interviews he "hardly finishes a sentence without repeating the phrase at least six or seven times." At age 12 he began to learn piano, and was introduced to the art of scat singing at 14 through records by Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong, amongst others. The piano provided him with a means of artistic expression to compensate for his speech difficulties. He remarked in a 1996 interview that "playing piano gave me a way to speak... I hid behind the piano because I was scared of talking."

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