Scatman John

John Paul Larkin (born March 13, 1942 in El Monte, California; died December 3, 1999 in Los Angeles), known as Scatman John, was a famous stutterer who invented a unique fusion of scat singing and disco. As he liked to say, this was

John Paul Larkin (born March 13, 1942 in El Monte, California; died December 3, 1999 in Los Angeles), known as Scatman John, was a famous stutterer who invented a unique fusion of scat singing and disco. As he liked to say, this was a process of "turning my biggest problem into my biggest asset." Scatman John has received 14 golds and 18 platinums for his albums and singles. He was also the recipient of the Annie Glenn Award for his outstanding service to the stuttering community, and was also inducted to the National Stuttering Association's Hall of Fame. In 1999, he died of lung cancer at his home in Los Angeles aged 57.

John Larkin suffered from a severe stutter "since [he] 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."