Originally from Kirksville, Indiana, he is a renowned instrumentalist who first learned to play piano from his father (“before I could talk”), later turning to guitar. His career began in the sixties, and he spent that decade developing his astonishing musical skills. Later, after some time spent teaching guitar at the Hank Thompson School of Country Music at Rogers State College in Oklahoma, he settled in Austin, Texas, where the lines between musical styles and genres are sometimes indistinct. There, he and his wife, “the lovely Miss Tanya Rae,” who had been one of his students at Rogers State, set up shop at the legendary Continental Club where, when not on tour, they perform “music for everybody.” His off-the-wall, original, country-rock songs—his admiration for Ernest Tubb inspired “My Baby Don't Dance to Nothin' But Ernest Tub”—are almost as well known as his cherry red “guit-steel,” a double-necked guitar he calls “Big Red.”
1993
Studio portrait/Nashville
