BIOGRAPHICAL OBSERVATION
I am a transplanted Okie who has lived long enough in Nebraska to call it home. I was exposed early and often to Western Swing and Southern gospel and blues music and it all stuck. I grew up in small-town Methodist parsonages across the state of Oklahoma, singing songs like "Rock of Ages" and "Just a Closer Walk with Thee" in the choir on Sundays and listening to Mama at home during the week rendering Bob Wills' songs - "Stay a Little Longer," "Take Me Back to Tulsa," "Daddy's Little Fatty" - over a sink of suds and dinner dishes.
Since then I've sung in clubs from The Tete-a-Tete in Providence to The Troubadour in Los Angeles, in coffee houses and concert halls and bars and churches and hospitals and hay fields and other places, as Woody Guthrie had it, "too fierce to mention." I've lectured on music and had it take me to school. I've parlayed guitar picking and writing and singing bluesy/folky songs into a good portion of a livelihood and a lot of enduring friendships. I am a long-time traveler with the Nebraska Arts Council's Touring Artist Program and have been a featured artist on numerous radio and television programs in Nebraska, including Nebraska Educational Television's "Plowing Up a Storm" and Tom May's "River City Folk." I was invited to the John F. Kennedy Center for Performing Arts in 1997 as Nebraska's representative to the Center's Statehood Days Concerts. I was nominated in four categories in the 2000 KZUM Members' Choice Awards and was named Blues Artist of the Year in 2000 and 2001.
I taught philosophy at Nebraska Wesleyan University in Lincoln for 32 years, retiring in 2001 to devote full time to writing, producing, and performing music. I am here yet, an Okie turned Nebraskan, happy about those combined influences that enable me to participate in some measure in the spirit of these words from Smeeha Khalil, a resident of the West Bank town of El-Birch: "For to sing is to be free and nobody can take this gift from us. Let us sing loudly together for life and the future of mankind, so that our harmonious voices would drown the dissonances of aggression, racism, and injustice."
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