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 been fortunate to 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 a memoir: “The Inner Circle, Book I – My Seventeen Years in the Cult of the American Sikhs.” I followed that in 2022 with my grandfather’s memoir “My First Life — Becoming a Man on the Colorado Frontier 1880-1905”, which had been lost for over 60 years. And in March 2025 I published “The Stone from Halfway Rock Revisited — A Lifetime of Adventures on the Coast of Maine.” All these books can be ordered through your local independent bookstore, or you can purchase directly from Sheep Island Press and receive a substantial discount.