Geno Skaggs was a blues musician back in the 1960s and 70s. He played bass with the great bluesman John Lee Hooker and separately with his cousin Earl Hooker. Geno even appeared on John Lee Hooker's 1971 album, Endless Boogie, with Steve "Fly Like an Eagle" Miller of Steve Miller Band fame. That's a strange coincidence since Boz Scaggs also played with Steve Miller and I'm not aware that Boz Scaggs and Geno Skaggs ever knew each other, but they both knew Steve Miller.
Chester Eugene "Geno" Skaggs was born June 3, 1937 in northern Indiana to Chester Willard Skaggs and Juanita Pigg. Below is the family tree:
1 Aaron Skaggs Sr.
2 Henry Skaggs (1759-1851)
2 Henry Skaggs (1759-1851)
+ Anne "Nancy" Davis
3 William Skaggs
+ Charity Robertson
4 Henry Skaggs
+ Nancy Richardson
5 Thomas Skaggs (1835-1912)
+ Mary Turner
6 Marion Jasper Skaggs (1860-1930)
+ Ettie Purcell
7 Omer Skaggs (1892-1956)
+ Myrtle Saiter
8 Chester Willard Skaggs (1916-1959)
+ Juanita Pigg
9 Chester Eugene "Geno" Skaggs (1937-1987)
You can see Geno descended from Aaron Skaggs Sr. who at one point we thought might have been another Long Hunter brother, however, Y-DNA testing of descendants of Aaron appears to have ruled that out.
Geno with a 1959 Fender bass
Geno's son, Ken Skaggs, also plays the blues and put up a tribute to his dad on Youtube:
"He learned how to play bass at 26 years old. By the time he was 27, around 1964, he was playing the blues club circuit in Chicago. He became what they called a session player, who was well known in Chicago blues circles and from 1964 to 1969 wound up playing with Earl Hooker, Muddy Waters, Otis Rush, Jimmy Reed, Luther Tucker, Little Walter, Eddie Taylor James Cotton and others. He was one of the original white blues players from Chicago, along with Elvin Bishop, Paul Butterfield, Mike Bloomfield, Mark Naftalin and Charlie Musselwhite, who helped engineer the electric blues sound that Chicago became famous for.
One night in 1968 Earl Hooker asked him to do some recording with him. Earl needed a bass player right away, so he hired Geno. After several albums with Earl, sadly, Earl Hooker passed away. Geno began working with John Lee Hooker at that time. And in 1969, he and some of his fellow Chicago blues musicians all started moving west, to the San Francisco area, which was to be the next big blues boom. And the rest is history.
Those first few years in SF, he recorded records with John Lee Hooker, Johnny "Big Moose" Walker, Lightning Hopkins, Freddie Roulette and others."
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