īarney Hilliard, former member of the Dave Lewis Combo, 2018.Īs a student at Seattle's Garfield High School Lewis formed the combo that would bring him to local prominence. They went on to perform at schools around Seattle, often for audiences who had never heard anything of the sort, at least not in live performance. Lewis's first performing group was a doo-wop vocal group called the Five Checks, formed to enter a talent show held at Edmond Meany Jr. Lewis tried both guitar and piano, but definitely gravitated toward the latter, especially after hearing Ray Charles, who was launching his performing career in Seattle in the late 1940s. His father worked as a fabricator at Boeing and also pulled shifts in a barber shop. The Lewis and Jones families both eventually moved to Seattle, where they lived about five blocks apart from one another in the Central District, the center of African-American life in Seattle at the time. One of their neighbors was the young Quincy Jones, who took some music lessons from David Sr. The family moved first to seek work in the navy town of Bremerton, Washington, across Puget Sound from Seattle, where they settled in the segregated Sinclair Heights housing projects. There was music in his background: his father, David Lewis, Sr., was an accomplished amateur guitarist, and his mother Bertha Lewis was similarly talented on piano. The Texas-born Lewis came to the Pacific Northwest with his family during World War II.

Peter Blecha accounts his Dave Lewis Combo as 'Seattle's first significant African American 1950s rock and roll band' and Lewis himself as 'the singularly most significant figure on the Pacific Northwest's nascent rhythm & blues scene in the 1950s and 1960s.' Life and early career David Eugene Lewis (1938 – March 13, 1998) was an American rock and rhythm & blues (R&B) keyboardist, organist, and vocalist based in Seattle, Washington, US.

Going Off Grid by Dave Lewis