I remember there always being music in our house when I was a child. My dad would play albums—78’s!—of classical music almost every evening and I fondly remember going to sleep to the sound of my mother’s piano playing. Aside from the classical recordings, I remember listening intently to Bing Crosby, Mahalia Jackson, Paul Robeson and an album of somebody singing Stephen Foster songs. I started piano lessons when I was five, and a year later was persuaded to switch to violin, influenced by family friends and relations among whom were many aspiring violinists. I continued with violin off and on throughout my childhood.
In my early teens I devoured the music that was on the top-40 radio stations—the early rock and roll of Elvis, Fats Domino, Little Richard, Carl Perkins, but also the other music that those stations played—Frank Sinatra, Mario Lanza, polka bands, movie themes, The Mormon Tabernacle Choir!
But I wasn’t inspired to try playing the music I heard on the radio until the “folk” groups of the late ’50s and early ’60s came along. I like to think I was attracted to that music more for its accessibility and DIY character than for its musical value. But from then on it was a progression through the Weavers and Pete Seeger to Woody Guthrie, the New Lost City Ramblers, Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, Stu Jamieson, Doc Watson.
Throughout the ’60s I played in coffee houses and college campuses around San Diego primarily as a solo performer, sharing evenings with other local performers like Jack Tempchin and Tom Waits and with people who ventured down from LA and beyond—Mayne Smith, Gil Turner, Rick Cunha, Guy Carawan, Clabe Hangan. My repertoire was a mix of old-time country music, cowboy songs, political songs, and in the late sixties I developed an interest in bluegrass and commercial country music.
In 1970 I teamed up with Kenny Wertz, Martin Henry, and Tom Pressley in the first band I was ever in, playing a mix of bluegrass tunes, Buck Owens songs, several Mayne Smith songs, in a funky bar in La Jolla called “the El Sombrero” [sic]. Some notables and future notables, like Chris Hillman, Glenn Frey, occasionally came and sat in with us. Jack Tempchin played there a while after we did and immortalized the place in a song called “One More Song.”
In 1972 I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area where I still live. Through the ’70s I played in a series of bluegrass and old-time bands, doing occasional solo gigs as well. I learned to be a decent guitar accompanist, playing with Rosalie Sorrels, Malvina Reynolds and Kate Wolf.
In 1979 I decided to try to put my early training as a violinist to use, along with my experience playing with expert fiddlers in various bands, to try to become a fiddler myself. I’m still at it. In the early ’80s I joined Daniel Steinberg, Paul Kotapish and Kevin Carr in the Hillbillies From Mars. We were hot stuff there for a while, playing primarily for contradancers all over the country. We still knock ’em dead when we emerge now and then from the shadows.
In 1991 I made a recording, Cowboy Dancing, followed closely behind in 2008 by Any Place I Hang My Hat. In 2018 I made Solo Ray—Easy Street. I’m still performing occasionally and playing the occasional contradance.
