Tall Paul Hankins

Paul Vernon Hankins was born in Fairhope, Alabama, a small town of 15.000 on the Gulf Coast, not far from Mobile, on 20th March 1937. Paul started to learn the music and the piano while attending the Baldwin County Training School. As a teenager, he began to play in several local bands. To get more opportunities, Hankins came to Chicago during the late 1950's. He soon married Edith Lillian Parnell (1936-2010), a childhood friend. At ease whether playing blues, jazz, Soul and Funk, Paul Hankins displayed his great talents as a pianist and organist with many Chicago bands, in clubs and in studios. Forming his own band composed of good sidemen like the Hudson Brothers, Paul recorded a lot behind people like Earl Hooker, Bobby Saxton, Freddy Robinson or Lillian Offit and under his name, mostly as an organist in the Jimmy Smith's mould with a striking downhome touch. With a large family and tired of the hectic and sometimes dangerous Chicago life, "Tall" Paul Hankins decided to go back to his native Alabama during the early 70's. A religious man, he dedicated more and more his organ and piano playing to his Fairhope's Twin Beech AME Zion Church. He died in Fairhope on 18 December 2010.