The Taj Mahal Sextet won a Grammy for Best Traditional Blues Album with Swingin’ Live at The Church in Tulsa. This marks Taj Mahal’s fifth win. The legendary artist was awarded the Grammy Merit Award this week for his career work over the course of 60 years. In accepting his Grammy during the Premiere Ceremony and accompanied by his two daughters. He also helped open the show with a performance with Wayne Brady, Yolanda Adams, Angelique Kidjo, Debrorah Cox, and Scott Hoying from Pentatonix.

Backstage, Taj thanks his parents for being born into a multi-cultural household which helped shaped his musical career. “For me it’s the water I swim in,” Taj said. “I was lucky enough to be born into a multicultural household and my father’s people from the Carribean and my mother’s people from the South… I grew up in a very fertile era of Jazz, Bebop and Gospel music, Popular music, Country music, everything. Rock n Roll hadn’t even happened in terms in the modern idea of Rock n Roll. The music was happening before then, and it was exciting. It’s all I ever remembered. Right now, when I’m talking to you, I’m listening to music in my head. There’s not a day that goes by that I’m not thinking about music.”

A Merit Award winner, Taj Mahal has helped popularize and reshape the scope of the blues and personify the concept of “World Music,” years before the phrase existed. He has explored and incorporated countless musical styles into his astonishing body of work, and he has collaborated with a vast range of musicians, including the Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton, Etta James, Angélique Kidjo, Ziggy Marley, and others. With his group, the Rising Sons — one of the first interracial bands —he opened for Otis Redding and The Temptations and mingled with giants like Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters. Taj has been inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame and honored with the Americana Music Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award.

Click here to view the full list of Grammy winners.