Born in Kalamazoo, Michigan in 1954. Grew up so far out in the country we couldn't see our nearest neighbors. We were the only house on the road. I started pounding on anything that looked vaguely like a drum (and many things that didn't) when I was very young, so my parents eventually got me a snare drum and some lessons. I taught myself to play blues piano in my early teens and spent my high school and college years playing keyboards and/or drums in various hard rock, prog rock, blues rock, and jazz fusion bands. I played my first professional gig at 15, which means I've been performing for 34 years now. Egad!

I moved to Seattle at age 21, spent a few years doing a new age solo piano thing and then took up folk music in 1980 because I had a girlfriend who was starting a folk band and wanted me to come play guitar. I kept telling her I was a keyboard and drum guy, not a guitarist, but she perservered and I learned. At some point in the 80s I picked up a Celtic harp, a cittern, several wind instruments which I still don't play very well, and continued adding to my ever-growing collection of ethnic hand drums.

I spent 20 years playing with my wife Anna in a duo called Telynor. We recorded four albums. I've recently started Crookshank, a six piece folk/rock/euro-trad fusion band. It's a lot of fun to have six players to fool around with (including electric bass and tablas) after so long as one of two musicians on the stage.

I'm the general manager of Dusty Strings, a company that runs a large acoustic music store and is a major builder of harps and hammered dulcimers (how many jobs are there where the fact that I play harp was a big deal at the interview?).

I live with my wife in a nice little house in a nice little neighborhood in north Seattle with our cat Bobo. I go to work every day, and play music as much as I want with talented people that I like a lot. I've been a vegetarian since 1975. I am blessed with good health, a good mind, good musical skills, a job I still like after 15 years, and a wife that still loves me after 19 years. Life could be a lot worse.

John Peekstok