About the Author: Gina Waggott is a writer, editor, disability advocate, and former TV professional. She is the author of Scatman John: The Remarkable Story of the World’s Unlikeliest Popstar, to be published by Bloomsbury on February 5th, 2026.  Gina is a covert stutterer who has been an active member of the stuttering community for 25 years. She is a former Vice Chair of Stamily, a diverse worldwide network for people who stutter and their allies, a former trustee of the European League of Stuttering Associations, and in the early 2000s ran StutteringChat, then the world’s largest online support group for people who stutter.

“The results of stuttering in my life can be likened to a grain of sand in an oyster that forced it to produce a pearl” – Scatman John Larkin 

I talk about Scatman John a lot. My last ISAD paper was about him. I gave a presentation about him at the World Congress in Finland. More recently, I just finished his biography. The story of Scatman John is one of the greatest examples of this year’s ISAD theme: how we turn challenges into strengths.

I used to carry around so much shame about my stutter that I even apologized for being a fervent fan (and friend) of a stuttering popstar. Now it’s unashamed – because in the years since John died in 1999, we haven’t had anyone, in my opinion, who has advocated for stuttering from a celebrity position as well as he did. He was the gold standard, the best we ever had. He had that rare combination of huge fame and an overt stutter that he wielded unapologetically and, in the end, fearlessly. The power of hearing and seeing that as a child is incalculable.

If you’re in the USA, you may have only heard his 90s hit single “Scatman (Ski-Ba-Bop-Ba-Dop-Bop)” if you’ve heard of him at all. In the rest of the world, though, John was everywhere in the mid-nineties. He topped the charts in dozens of countries, had his image featured on Coca-Cola cans, and Japan even had Scatman John dolls. All this is pretty cool, right? But it’s surface-level stuff, the Wikipedia lite, the usual facts people know.

What I want to share with you instead is what rarely gets talked about: John’s personal journey with stuttering, and his close involvement with the stuttering community. There’s a reason you should know this in 2025, too, and we’ll get to that.

From Shame to Stage

John was born in El Sereno, California, in 1942. He stuttered as soon as he started talking. He said he could never remember any early fluency at all. His stutter became so pronounced he found it difficult to get through single words, never mind whole sentences. In the 1940s and 1950s, the approach was to ignore it or, in John’s case, undergo speech therapy that focused solely on the mechanics of achieving fluency. John remembered he was fluent if he talked in tempo. “Like a damn robot,” he said. “Who wants to sound like that?”

Bullied, tormented and punch-drunk with shame, John was a fiercely expressive and emotional boy, endlessly frustrated by his stuttering. When he first sat down at a piano, he knew he had found his means of expression. As a teen, he rebelled: smoking, drinking and stealing, yet continually taught himself how to play jazz, a genre he loved because it was filled with “feeling people.”

By the time he was in college, he was a fixture in LA’s clubs, but had also fallen into the same occupational hazard as many jazz musicians, and began a long and destructive relationship with drugs and alcohol. They dulled his anxieties, numbed his stutter, and trapped him in a cycle that nearly ended his career – and him.

As his musical talent ballooned, so did his ever-increasing taste for drugs. By the 1980s he was not just a user but a dealer, and had moved on to cocaine and heroin. He survived near-homelessness and multiple overdoses, including one where he stopped breathing on his heroin dealer’s floor – technically dead – until he was resuscitated.

Rock bottom arrived in 1986, when the drugs had long ceased to control his stuttering or his feelings about it. He had to decide whether he wanted to live or die. He chose to live. He began confronting the wreckage of his addictions, his broken relationships, and, at last, his speech.

Finding His Community

Around 1991, four years into his sobriety, John walked into a meeting of the National Stuttering Project (now the National Stuttering Association) in Los Angeles. Judy – the woman who would later become his wife – described him as a quiet, hesitant man, still uneasy speaking without chemical help. What he found at those meetings was what so many of us find: people who “get it.” Meeting others who stuttered marked the beginning of his long and complicated road to self-acceptance.

John still struggled to find work in LA so he and Judy moved to Europe to further his career. First to Berlin, then Amsterdam. His skills and singing as a jazz pianist were more warmly received, and he began bookings in top hotels and on cruise ships. Alongside playing piano, John would sing and “scat,” a vocal technique that uses the voice as an instrument, improvising nonsense syllables into the rhythm of jazz. John had perfected the form using his stutter: the halting, broken syllables in his speech directly informed the punchy, fast-paced scales of scat-singing. Thanks to his stutter, John was superb at it.

His performances caught the attention of Manfred Zahringer, owner of Iceberg Records in Denmark. After trying for years to get John a jazz album deal, in 1994 Manfred had an idea that would change John’s life forever. He proposed blending John’s scat-singing with the modern electronic dance music on the charts. John, at 52, was skeptical but had nothing to lose. The deal was done for him to record a single, but John was terrified. His prevailing thought? What if the world finds out I stutter? Worse – what if he was interviewed on radio or TV?

It was his wife, Judy, who suggested disclosure – talk about stuttering in the song itself, she said. The result was Scatman (Ski-Ba-Bop-Ba-Dop-Bop). Despite never having rapped in his life, John spent several hours in a recording studio creating this song about stuttering, adding lyrics that said if he, the Scatman, could do it, then so could you. He knew his audience would be kids. He wanted to be positive and encourage them.

Global Stardom and Advocacy

John returned to performing jazz concerts, never expecting the song to chart. It not only charted, it took off like a rocket across Europe, South America, and Asia, hitting #1 in several countries. Flung into a whirlwind of promotion and interviews, John initially tried to hide his stutter, to appear more fluent. He was still ashamed of it. Then, in his very first radio interview, the DJ asked if he was faking his stutter for publicity. John was aghast, and it lit a fuse in him. 

This was the first shame he had felt over NOT stuttering. He realized: he had to go ahead and stutter – something he had felt toxic shame about all his life. But he would do it, he decided, for his audience of kids. He not only addressed stuttering in his songs, but also talked about how it was okay to feel, to be different, and to have something you thought was a “problem,” because you can grasp it and use it as fuel. Look at me, he would say. I’ve done this the hard way – listen to me. I know what I’m talking about.

The worldwide stuttering community embraced John early on, and he embraced them back. Despite what was now a brutal and unforgiving schedule for a 52-year-old ex-drug addict who had suddenly become the best-selling artist in Europe (Michael Jackson was second), he rallied. He gave interviews for several national associations, including the keynote address at the NSA in 1995. When he won a Grand Prix single of the year award in Japan, he donated its million yen prize to the Japanese association, and invited swathes of their members backstage to his sold-out concerts there. He was a guest in many stuttering chat rooms and a fixture at conventions. He mentored some stuttering kids on a one-to-one basis – including me. He stuttered openly on MTV, VH1, VIVA, the BBC. He mentioned it in every interview – and he gave hundreds of them. In the era before social media, he was a one-man stuttering awareness representation machine.

It was not all joy and rainbows, though. At the Echo Awards in 1996, John stuttered so much that they cut his acceptance speech out of the broadcast. In Finland, a TV host mocked his speech, but John took the opportunity to talk about it. During a live performance in Portugal, when he was having what he described as a “very bad” speech day, a member of the audience burst out laughing at his repetitions. Unperturbed, he flipped the script. “It’s cute, isn’t it?” he grinned – forcing them to laugh with him, and not at him. 

John’s fame burned brightly but briefly. His health began failing almost as soon as he had tasted success, and by 1998 he had all but disappeared from public life as he fought a variety of puzzling and debilitating symptoms that doctors could find no answer for. By the time his small-cell lung cancer was discovered in 1999, it had already spread to his brain. He died on December 3, 1999, at the age of 57. 

The Legacy Lives On

So why am I telling you all this? It’s a wonderful story, sure – but it’s also a call to action. In the years since John’s death, his music hasn’t faded. In fact, it’s found new life, and he’s more popular now than he was in the 90s. His songs have now been streamed over half a billion times. Around five million people a month listen to his song about stuttering. He even became an internet meme, and is used as a symbol of someone who turned a challenge into a strength.

What’s remarkable is that so many of those tributes, memes, and videos come from fluent people. They speak about stuttering with respect, with curiosity, with admiration… because of John. That’s powerful stuff. 

So use him. Use John as a conversation starter, as a spark of nostalgia, as a way to connect and broaden understanding about stuttering. Play his music. Share his story. Make sure no one thinks stuttering should hold them back from anything. Because that’s exactly what John would have wanted.