Backstories: How My Music and Inventions Brought the Piano to Life

Ezra Charles is Houston’s most celebrated piano player, winning the Houston Press Readers’ Poll in six different years between 1992 and 2013, along with many other awards. But before he adopted the stage name Ezra Charles in 1983, he was already famous in the music world as Charles Helpinstill, the inventor and manufacturer of the Helpinstill line of piano products. In the course of his long career on both sides of the footlights, he met and interacted with dozens of music superstars. Now he has written the backstories of both his life as a musician, and his personal adventures with the rock heroes after he invented the device that made it possible for the world to hear them. Each of the forty-five chapters in the book primarily tells a story of an individual celebrity he met. Since the book is in chronological order, it becomes the life story of a musician growing up in the Gulf Coast region of Southeast Texas that spawned several generations of legendary contributors to American Music.