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I've been playing and performing music since my early teen-aged years. At that time I convinced my dad to buy me a guitar and commenced to study jazz and play folk music. During my university years I studied at the School of the Goodman Theatre at the Art Institute of Chicago. Musically I slipped into the blues for and played it until I had to stop. One day, in San Francisco, I sold my Martin guitar, bought a mountain dulcimer, picked up a drive-away car, and headed east.
Now, my children are grown and I'm able to bring the popular music of the mid-nineteenth century back to America. I'm glad for this because not a lot of people have heard this music. It is not folk music and it departs entirely from the sentimental Italianate music of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, which was performed on American stages by European artists. Americans one and all, the early minstrels replaced this with music that is the child of African rhythms and Anglo-Irish tunes, which met and married in our roiling young society.
Here is a photo at Musterfield Farm
It's great fun to play and sing this music. Many of the songs of the antebellum minstrel stage are inseparable from the American experience—songs like “Old Dan Tucker,“ “De Blue Tail Fly,” “Oh! Susanna,” and “Buffalo Gals.” Plus, all of America’s popular musical forms—Rock n' roll, hip-hop, bluegrass, country, jazz and their derivatives—are rooted in this, our nation's first pop craze. When you hear me play and sing the original arrangements of the minstrels’ tunes on my period banjo, you’ll know that this is the sound of modern America’s first music.
Rich and poor, young and old, black and white, Americans flocked to theaters, taverns, fairs, circuses, and street corners to be entertained by minstrels. I'm available to play in any venue similar to these and have played them all, except the circus. My performances are given first of all for entertainment, though I have prepared some topical acts, such as: "Play Ball! Play Banjo!" – which ties the story of the emerging national culture with the new music and the new sport of baseball. "Ho! The Car Emancipation" tells of American slavery and the Underground Railroad. "The Life and Times of John Brown" traces the events leading to our greatest national trauma, the Civil War.
These and other stories are drawn from primary sources and woven in among the songs people were singing at the time. I have used this music to teach in elementary, middle school, high school, and college levels.
But mainly I entertain. Rather I should say this music makes it possible for me to be entertaining. It has a life and meaning all its own. I'm grateful to have the talent and opportunity to perform it. Use the menu on the left of this page and you'll find an annotated set list of some of my songs, samples of my playing, and contact and booking information for my performances.
