Enjoy the Challenge! Contest Starts June 1!

In appreciation of Black Music Month, OSAAT Entertainment & Concord Music Group present the Best Storytellas in Town Contest!

The contest begins June 1, 2013 and all entries must be postmarked by June 30, 2013. No purchase is necessary to enter and contest is only open to U.S. residents in the 50 U.S. States and Puerto Rico. Entrants must have a valid email and mailing address.

For guidelines and rules, visit: osaatent.com/storytellas_contest

We are looking for gifted storytellers who have an original story to tell about how music influences them. The first 10 storytellas to submit their story will receive a FREE CD from the Concord Music Group. First, second and third place winners will have their work published by OSAAT Entertainment and will receive additional prizes.

As for me, & music, I was listening to, and swayed by and swaying to music long before I took the pen to paper. My parents bopping and cha-cha'ing around the living room on Sundays may have started it. Sam Cooke, Jackie Wilson, Otis Redding and artists along that vein, had them polishing our floors better than any amount of hands down on both knees and Mop n Glo could have ever done.

When Motown started really vamping up and groups like the legendary Supremes and Temptations, and not long thereafter the Jackson Five along with a number of others began hitting the radio airwaves, my father started shying away from the dance floor. It wasn't his type of music, though this wasn't true for my mother. She loved music, and loved to dance; despite having shied away from accepting a 4-year scholarship to Philander Smith College... to dance, albeit which ironically blends into the story of how she met my dad.

All to say, by the time it came my turn to polish them floors, playing and dancing to songs like FIRECRACKER—over and over, something to this very day I still get teased about, my father was ready to throw me, his beautiful thousand dollar stereo he worked overtime to purchase, and every musician whoever thought to create music, to the other side of the world.

And yet… and even so… today I marvel over the depths and breadth of how music not only led to my creation, but how it influences me, and my writing, feeding into boundless layers of inspiration, energetic enough to work like the gift that keeps on giving.

But that's a clip of my story. What is yours?