​I came to love music at a very early age... music was my best friend, you might say.  My father was an Iron Worker on construction.  It meant either he worked away from home and we never saw him, or we went with him.  Often we did the latter.  It made life rich​ in experience but poor in life-long friends.  Music seemed a good substitute.

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My first ever music purchase was the Lovin' Spoonful.  Six O'Clock, the single.  It was 1967.   I was nine and got my first record player, and with it, a few singles. ​

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​​Soon, I was buying albums.  I loved The Staple Singers, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Aretha Franklin, well, pretty much anything Motown, Nilsson, James Taylor, Daddy Dewdrop, Tony Joe White, Paul Revere and the Raiders, Herman's Hermits... the list is endless. When I was fourteen I discovered "Catch Bull at Four" by Cat Stevens.  It was unlike anything​ I'd ever heard and really intrigued me. Another Cat Stevens album, "Foreigner", was released just around the time my father died. This music had a big effect on me and helped me through a difficult adolescence... ​ soon we moved to Tennessee where my mother was from.

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​Just about everybody I knew​ in Tennessee played an instrument.  I loved to sing along with people playing until I found another Cat Stevens song, "How Can I Tell You", that I wanted to sing but no one was willing to learn... so I borrowed a 12-string guitar and took six strings off and learned to play.  I also learned the importance of new strings and low action!​

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My good friend, Ben Seymour (http://www.kudzupatch.net), found my first guitar, which I still have, a Yamaha, at a car parts store in Winchester Tennessee.  It has been a friend ever since.



​I began to enjoy other types of music and my preferences expanded.  I listen to pretty much everything (with a few exeptions!) and can appreciate everything from Hank Williams to Frank Zappa and everything in between.​



​The songs I write, however, seem to have a life of their own.  I didn't choose a style or form or try to go "into myself" or anything like that, they just come out as they are.  The first song I ever wrote, "Holders Cove Road", came  out of necessity - I was homesick - and it comforted me.  The second song I wrote was a song called, "Ordinary Life", which chronicles a difficult period of time in my life.  You can hear this song in my Songs section, along with "Tromp L'eoil", which was influenced by a wonderful painting I saw in Teignmouth, England of a lonely looking row of buildings by the sea, where on the beach sat a disused ship.​



After being laid off at my job, I accepted an offer of recording from a friend, Danny Cahill, who wanted a guinea pig for his new studio.  I played a song I'd written and he asked me if I could write any more.

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"Why not?" I replied...​