Playing with Cornell Dupree was a life long dream. If I saw his name on a record credit, I bought that record! There were quite a lot of those records in my collection. And then one night I played with Cornell at a club called Memphis in Midtown Manhattan and a real bond was formed. He asked me to go to Japan with he and Richard Tee the following week then we did a record when we got back to NYC. and then another record and another European tour and another record and a US tour in the end I had played on 5 Cornell Dupree records and he asked me for songs and I gave him 3 and we did all of them! One of those songs called Ramona and it became the theme for the Newport Jazz Festival for a few years!