I have been playing music since my mother started me on piano lessons at age four. At 8 I entered the junior choir at the Washington National Cathedral, graduating to the senior choir in the next school year, allowing me to enroll at St. Albans School with a modest scholarship. That year I also switched from piano to classical guitar, studying with Aaron Shearer, who started the classical guitar department at Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore. I immediately began playing folk and rock, and performed with a couple of bands through high school. After one year of college at St. Johns in Annapolis, I started Claude Jones, which quickly became one of the DC area’s most popular bands. Since that time I have shared the stage with many of the greatest names in folk, rock and classical music.
More recently I served for four years as president of the Maine Songwriters Association and served as the former music columnist for the Coastal Journal. My song “Vicksburg,” which is featured on Hollowbody Electric Band’s “Prickly Stickers” CD, won the 2014 Maine Songwriting Contest.
During the Covid-19 pandemic I took a break from performing and completed two major building projects: the renovation of an 1840s post and beam barn into living space, and construction of a post and beam cottage on the side lot of the property my wife, Johannah, and I share in Bath, Maine.
In May 2021, I published my second memoir: “The Inner Circle, Book I – My Seventeen Years in the Cult of the American Sikhs” which is available in selected independent bookstores, and online at https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1737228009. I followed up by studying with the IAOTRC to become a certified Trauma Recovery Coach with the intention of helping others who have experienced religious and spiritual abuse. I also edited and published my grandfather’s memoir “My First Life — Becoming a Man on the Colorado Frontier, 1880 – 1905” which had been lost for more than 60 years. It is also available online at https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1737228017.
More recently I produced a body of watercolors, mostly of seascapes and shipwrecks — subjects that have long intrigued me with the dramatic power of nature. My most recent project is “Higher Ground”, an album of my great-grandfather Johnson Oatman, Jr.’s most famous hymns that I edited and set to new original music.