I grew up on Pete Seeger and Burl Ives records, so I had an appreciation for folk music at an early age, but my listening to it went into hibernation in my teens. In my mid-twenties I had a major rebirth moment when I chanced on a New Lost City Ramblers record at the local library. I became hooked on their albums. My biggest folk music religious conversion moment took place in the Fall of 1985 when, again at the library, chanced on The Bothy Band's first album. I must have played the 2nd track about ten times in a row that day. I'd never heard a fiddler like Tommy Peoples before, never heard such exciting and passionate music, and that album literally changed the course of my life. I took my violin out of it's 12 year hiatus in the closet, and started bringing it to a Tuesday night session in my hometown. One evening, a young fiddler showed up and blew everyone away. Turned out to be Alasdair Fraser, and I had my second converson into Scottish music. My third major conversion (without sacrificing the other two) came in late 1989, when some friends I met through the Irish session took me to a chantey sing aboard an historic ship in San Francisco. A National Parks Rnger was leading the sing, and it just hit me that that would be my dream job. I went up to her at the end of the evening and told her I was interested in becoming a Ranger there. She got me started volunteering, and in June of '92 I was hired. It's amazing how one thing leads to another in this kind of music - all because I chanced on a record at the library and was curious enough to try it out. It makes you think of your life as divided between the "before" and "after" getting turned on to folk music. It's hard to imagine back to the "before" period sometimes. How did I live without it? Do you ever get the feeling that you were born to have this passion for folk/traditional music, and that it was just waiting for some incident to happen to get you involved? It seems both accidental and inevitable.

-chanteyranger