Pimps & Preachers

Alright, Zoo Freaks, settle in. The Zoo Crew's got Paul Thorn on the turntable with "Pimps & Preachers," the title cut off his 2010 album of the same name, and this one comes straight out of the man's own backyard. His daddy was a Pentecostal preacher who drove a Cadillac and really did love people, not just talk about it. His uncle, who folks called Uncle Merle, drove a Ford, dressed flashy, and for a stretch of his life was an actual pimp. When Paul was about twelve that uncle showed back up after the family had figured he was gone for good, took the boy under his wing, and taught him things a twelve-year-old had no business knowing, including how to box. Paul has said he fought less because he loved the ring and more because he wanted that uncle proud of him. One night he got hit so hard he saw three of the other guy. Uncle told him that meant he had six hands, so get back out there and use them. He did, and he won.

The song lays it out plain. One dragged him through the darkness, one led him to the light. One showed him how to love, one taught him how to fight. Paul has said that once he left the small-town church world and started touring, both of those lessons kept him from getting stomped. The preacher side is why he still likes the down-and-out folks as much as the ones who can do him some good. The pimp side roughed him up enough that he could handle rooms full of people of questionable nature. And here is the part that closes the circle. That same uncle, later in life, ended up a grandfather working in a nursing home, going around cheering up lonely old folks who didn't have anybody coming to visit. Paul figures in the end his daddy and his uncle were doing the same job, just in front of a different crowd. He painted the album cover himself, a street scene at the corner of Redemption Lane and Turn Out Boulevard, preacher and pimp both dressed to the nines, and a little boy with a tambourine that says Jesus on it, eyes looking back toward the street. That little boy, he says, is him.

How he got started is its own tale. Born up in Wisconsin, raised in Tupelo, Mississippi, same town that raised Elvis, he sang in his daddy's churches and played tambourine. His first paying gig was a revival when he was about three. Folks dropped money in the tambourine, and afterward he spent it on a Coke for a little girl he had a crush on. That was the first date too. Then the boxing took over. He went pro, ran up a 14 and 4 record, won the Mid-South Middleweight title, and in 1988 climbed in with Roberto Duran on national television in Atlantic City. Duran whupped him. Paul has always said Duran was the better man, and that fight showed him he was good at a certain level but not world-champion good. He hung up the gloves, went to work in a Tupelo furniture factory making chairs, jumped out of airplanes for fun, and played whatever club would have him at night. Secular music had been off-limits growing up, so he was learning the whole thing on the fly.

The break came in 1997 at a singer-songwriter night in a pizza place called Vanelli's. A fellow from BMI heard him, word got to Nashville, and before long Wyatt Easterling and Miles Copeland had him out of that chair factory. Within about thirty days he was opening for Sting in front of something like thirty thousand people with nothing but a little acoustic guitar. He had never even been to a concert before that, on account of the church. He figured the buzzards were circling. They weren't. Sting liked him, John Prine liked him enough to take him out for about fifty shows, and the first record, Hammer & Nail, came out on A&M that same year. He has been putting out his own records ever since on a label he named, with a straight face, Perpetual Obscurity.

If you want more of Paul, his home base on the web is paulthorn.com. He keeps a verified page over on Facebook, posts pictures and road notes on Instagram as paulthornmusic, and you will find him on X under the handle pimpspreachers, which tells you he never got tired of that title. Folks who have been riding with the band for years also gather in The Paul Thorn Band Group on Facebook, a fan page for anybody who figures there is nobody quite like this Mississippi boy raised by a preacher and a pimp. We will let the record spin. This is the Zoo Crew, and you are listening to The Zoo.