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| Wednesday October 08, 2008 |
Event: Cowboy Johnson & Amanda Pearcy Private Concert
Location: Blacksburg, VA
Time: 7:30 PM
Reservations required: yes |
Website: www.cowboyjohnson.com
Feedback: 7:30 - 8:30pm, private concert. Contact us for more information if this evening fits your schedule better than Thursday at Easy Chair. Cowboy is one of Tom's favorite singers, his voice will touch you deep inside. Amanda is fairly new to the music scene and we're excited to hear her play live. Check out their websites and my space pages and the bios below. www.amandapearcy.com www.cowboyjohnson.com www.myspace.com/cowboyjohnsonmusic www.myspace.com/amandapearcymusic Cowboy's bio: Kent Johnson's parents didn’t give him the name "Cowboy", but it has been tattooed on his chest for 30 years now. So yes, that's his real name. He was born in Lancashire, England while his dad was in the Air Force, but the family moved back to the states and he spent most of his childhood in California. Like many of the great singers, he sang gospel music in the church choir as a child before the Johnsons moved to Minnesota when Kent was 15. By 1969, at the age of 16, he was on his own and ended up in the Black Hills of South Dakota, where he spent the 70's working the mines, playing music and living hard. It was there that a disgruntled neighbor, whose mailbox Kent had shot full of holes one drunken afternoon, declared to the community "we gotta do something about this damn cowboy". The name stuck, but the alcoholism and addiction he had been struggling with for years did not. Sober now for 24 years, Cowboy sings songs of pain, loss, regret and redemption. His voice betrays the truth that he has actually lived these songs. He has danced with his demons and you can hear them in the soulful honesty of his voice. Cowboy shares his hard won wisdom as a certified co-leader of the worldwide "New Warrior" training for men. A journeyman carpenter and former member of the steel workers' and painters' unions, he has made his living with his hands for close to four decades. Through four marriages and divorces, the births of three children, the challenges of recovery and the loss of both of his parents, music has been his foundation. Cowboy Johnson knows thousands of songs and writes his own when the spirit moves him. Mostly he is a singer of great songs and he doesn't care where they come from. He moved to Austin, Texas in 1996 and began to tap into a goldmine of songs by Texas writers, expanding his already extensive repertoire. He first heard Mickey Newbury's music in 1970 and has been a fan ever since. Cowboy's voice and Mickey's songs are a musical marriage made in heaven. After Mickey's death in 2002, Cowboy became determined to carry on his legacy by recording an entire album of Newbury's songs. The stars lined up in late 2003 and he recorded the first CD of his career with his old friend from South Dakota, Chris Gage, in the producer's seat. Gage has been a believer in Cowboy's talent since the 70's and the two carefully created "Cowboy Johnson - A Grain of Sand", a CD that beautifully showcases Cowboy's voice and Mickey's songs. Gage's record label (with his musical partner and wife Christine Albert), MoonHouse Records, has licensed the project and is promoting its release. Cowboy Johnson, currently living in Austin, Texas, recently filmed a "Songwriters in the Round" television show for The Austin Music Network and has been steadily building a loyal following with regular regional performances. He is happily trading the hammer for the guitar. Amanda's bio: It's only been two years since I got my late husband's guitar out of the closet and took my first guitar lesson and even less time since I started writing my songs, and I have already had the honor of sharing the stage on WUWF's RadioLive program with Ellis Paul and Tom Kimmel. I have had a colorful life, one that has blessed me with a lot of material for songs, songs I suppose that would be considered having an Americana/Singer-Songwriter/Adult Contemporary sound to them. Songs that are about what I've lived and what I've heard and what I've felt and seen. Since taking that first guitar lesson and letting the stories pour out of me, I finally have something to feel passionate about (besides raising my son {and my dogs!}). Like a line from one of my songs, "I am wide awake in my dreams". I was raised in Houston, the youngest of 4 with lots of years between me and my siblings (the oldest being my brother with cerebral palsy at 13 yrs my senior), by a motherless mother and a fatherless father in an alcoholic home. Although I yearned to express myself creatively in a musical way during my childhood, it just didn't happen. So I pursued the easier (for me) self taught route of visual arts and was accepted into a high school in Houston for the performing and visual arts. I moved to Austin under the guise of transferring to The University of Texas where I majored in Anthropology. I ended up graduating nine months pregnant. Back then we made our home in the Lost Pines of Bastrop, where I'd hang cloth diapers out on the line to dry and my husband would leave every morning before the sun came up to go to the rig. He worked seven days a week as a derrick man and had a day off only if the rig was down. We had three sweet traditional years together. He passed away when our son was two years old, leaving us with not much more than a '71 Olds Cutlass Supreme (hard top) and a '72 Olds Delta 88 Royal. Thinking I needed more reliable transportation, I regrettably sold them and put a down payment on a lil' Chevy S-10 pick-up. After a few hard years in Smithville, my son and I moved to Wimberley where I met my beloved Cowboy and I almost killed the three of us in that pick-up while driving on Purgatory Road off Devil's Backbone.... and the rest of the stories are working their way into my songs.
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