New Albany’s small African American community produced notable musicians including Sam Mosley and Bob Johnson, who began a prolific partnership in 1967 after Mosley returned from service in Vietnam and joined his former schoolmate Johnson. Performing together for 31 years, they built a hometown success story as performers, producers, and songwriters, recording blues and southern soul as Mosley & Johnson in the 1980s and 1990s for the Muscle Shoals Sound and Malaco labels, while also finding greater success writing songs for Malaco artists such as Johnnie Taylor, Bobby Bland, and Little Milton. Their first album, Mississippi Mud, appeared in 1971 on their own Sabo label as Sam and Bob & the Soulmen, and they also recorded in the 1970s for Polydor as Mojoba. Sam Mosley, born in the Beaver Dam community on March 30, 1946, came from a musical family that included his father, sharecropper Joe Mosley, and in 1959 Joe’s sons Jamie, Sam, and Ralph performed as Jamie & the Dynamics. Robert A. “Bob” Johnson was born in New Albany on March 4, 1946, and he had been leading Bobby Johnson & the Messengers before the two men joined forces. Though neither had formal musical training, they later learned arranging and producing while working with the Muscle Shoals studio band in Alabama. After Johnson died of a heart attack onstage at a performance in Verona, Mississippi, on August 22, 1998, Mosley and Bob’s brothers Willie and Miles continued as the Mosley Johnson Band. New Albany native Billy Ball also blended blues with soul, R&B, and funk, singing gospel with the Ball Quartet, joining George “Bally” Smith’s Tupelo band in the early 1950s, forming Billy Ball & the Upsetters in 1957, and later establishing himself in Indianapolis, Indiana, where he taught school and recorded several sought-after 45s. Another musical lineage connected to New Albany was the Morganfield family: Dave Morganfield, born into slavery, appeared in the first post-Civil War census there in 1870 when New Albany was still part of Pontotoc County, and his grandson McKinley Morganfield later achieved worldwide blues fame as Muddy Waters, while other Morganfields were active in gospel music.