Neal Francis

Francis was born in Livingston, New Jersey and raised in Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. He began playing the piano when he was a very young child, mimicking the sounds he heard on television. He started taking piano lessons with a classical teacher when he was four, and at 12, drawn to the blues, he began studying with boogie-woogie pianist Erwin Helfer. He played in his first band, the Reverend Funk Connection, in high school, and as a teenager sat in with blues artists at Chicago clubs.