I learned to love singing
soon after (and because) the Beatles stormed across the US of A. I took
my first guitar lessons in San Luis Obispo, California, when I was seventeen.
My first band—in Eugene, Oregon—was called Medicine Wolf;
we did New Riders, Old & in the Way, and Jerry Jeff Walker tunes.
The next band was a six-piece event called Slow Buck; we did Asleep
at the Wheel, country rock, and more newgrass. Then there was another
incarnation of Slow Buck, then Panama Beaver, then The Megatones, then
Slow Buck (III), and then Incognito (1988?). There might’ve been
others.
Somewhere
in there I was invited to sing bass in The Fabulous Whitetones, a very
fun a cappella doowop band and precursor to THE TONES, with whom I’m
still singing lead and bass, albeit long-distance (but not for long!!).
I also started writing and recording songs in about 1985 (there were tunes
written before that time, but we won’t talk about them) and somewhere
in there—around 1989—Lynda Duffy and I started writing and
recording a cappella jingles for businesses in Eugene, Oregon. My big
claim to fame was having a lead vocal on the Claymation (Raisins!) Christmas
TV special.
My solo career started to evolve—if not take off—in about ’89, when my first album (on cassette) came out. I made it onto the front page of a Sunday “Lifestyle” section of the Chicago Tribune and had a good run of performing at clubs, self-help bookstores and festivals around the US. Three more cassettes were produced over the course of the next three years; many of those recordings are on my current CD; a number of them won or placed in songwriting competitions, and a few more have been (recently) used in documentaries and indie feature films.
I got married, moved to Seattle, got some good festival gigs going—including Bumbershoot, Northwest Folklife, and the Willamette Valley Folk Festival—and hosted a couple of songwriters’ showcases, collaborated on a hefty soundtrack album for a documentary about Vietnam, and then my wife and I moved – this time to Baltimore – in ’93. About ten years went by during which I unknowingly and progressively embodied the lyrics of my own song, “SLAVE.” A couple of Baltimore highlights include the time I almost landed the ballpark announcer job with the Baltimore Orioles, replacing Rex Barney, and the experience of running a whitewater kayaking school. That and having a son!
It took awhile to find a niche in the east coast music scene, but things started picking up in 2003, when I founded The Swing States Road Show. We put out two CDs (Swing States and Housecleaning), played in seven states, opened shows for Howard Dean, Al Franken, and Dennis Kucinovich, got featured on NPR, and shared the road in Parkersburg WV with the True Majority pig.
In the context of that band, I had the pleasure of playing music with some of the best pickers in the mid-Atlantic region, including fiddler Alex Mitchell, dobro man Dave Giegerich, clarinetist Seth Kibel, guitarist Rolly Brown, and a host of other fantastic musicians/concerned citizens.
As of 2007 we have a new version of The Swing States Road Show singing 'songs of peace love and understanding from Bob Wills to Bob Marley' and an even newer group - FNG - performing the material from Selector Switch On (Rock and Roll) AND serving as 'house band' at this year's 25th Anniversary of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on the National Mall in Washington, DC.
Holy sh**!
Keep plugging, friends! You never know what'll happen until you try!
Peace,
Lea
(Lea has been playing a Taylor 810 acoustic guitar since 1993.)
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