My first musical memories are of old time Baptist church hymns and Hank Williams on the radio. That combination of "Just as I Am" and "I'll never get out of this world Alive", was the beginning of a strange juxtaposition in my life.

I was born on a little farm in East Tennessee in 1952. My daddy sold fifty muskrat skins at two bucks apiece to pay the doctor. The first seven years immersed me in the natural world of a small hill farm. Cows in the barn, corn in the crib, and an old outhouse out back. In 1959, we loaded up in a fifty-four Ford and moved to Southern California, to a small beach town south of L.A. That year was the end of a twenty year period, from 1940 to 1960, when over three million people left the mountains of Southern Appalachia to find work. The largest out-migration of recorded history swept us up in the last wave, and there we sat, on the beach, looking out over the Pacific Ocean. We may as well have been on another planet. My juxtaposition of reality took another hit.

Slowly settling into this sunny world of strange-talking people and the Everly Brothers on the radio, my parents split for the second and last time. Mom married into an old traditional Hawaiian family from Maui. I was immersed into the open arms of a loving family and yet another culture. The whole Hawaiian family was musical, with all the traditional dance, food, and history of the islands. My view of reality and the world expanded yet again, with almost an audible creaking sound in my little head, as I went from cornbread and beans to raw fish and rice. Although the whole Hawaiian family was musical, it was my Grandfather Alex Akina who saw my interest on those evenings when everyone gathered to eat and play music. He put the ukulele in my hands and taught me three chords. I was suddenly in a band of the most magical kind. Very soon I got my first guitar, a seven dollar beauty from Tijuana. A songbook with "Swing Low Sweet Chariot" put me into musical heaven. I've moved in and out of that heaven ever since. California during the sixties was a true cultural experience. The musical roots that all of us "fifty-something" folks share seemed to be happening right outside my door. In fact, the place got so much attention during the sixties, that everything seemed to be happening right outside my door. Frequent trips to Maui and back to Tennessee sharpened the broad view, but kept me open-minded enough and culturally unidentifiable enough to guarantee that I not really fit in anywhere. This has been a blessing of the most unexpected kind. I learned to see. I learned the beauty of diversity. I saw that the planet had created a rainbow of beautiful cultures, beliefs, food, music, faith.

All this led to the years I now call "torturing my mother".
I wandered with my backpack through the U.S., Canada, and the Hawaiian Islands. On one of those trips, I ended up coming back through Tennessee In the fall of 1973 and falling in love once again with a little Hilltop of land that my grandfather and great-grandfather used to tenant-farm and plow with an old mule. I took the dive, bought the land, took a bus back to southern California, sold my old car, bought a bicycle, rode it to work each day up the coast Highway to a little cabinet shop, and over the next several years of more of the same, I paid for my little piece of place that I would call home. Just like a large majority of those three million mountain people who left, I came home.

to be continued...

Contact Me        Check out MySpace