I grew up in beautiful downtown Hertford, N.C. I started playing guitar when I was nine. My first band was The Mustangs in the eighth grade. After graduating East Carolina University in 1983 I moved to Norfolk, Va. and played in a rock band called EKG. We gigged and split up back and forth for several years. Around 1985 I joined The Blues Defenders. We gigged quite a bit around Hampton Roads and up and down the Eastern Seaboard. We placed third nationally in a Blues Competition for Malaco Records in Memphis, TN in 1987. Marty Jones (currently with Marty Jones and the Pork Boilin' Poor Boys) and I wrote several songs for our album I Heard That. Towards the end of my tenure with The Blues Defenders I was playing with the Abingdon All Stars, The Jailtones and The Blues Defenders on any given night. All three of the bands did several of the same songs, all with different arrangements and in different keys. That was interesting! During the late eighties and early nineties, Nick Bonus from The Jailtones and I had a duo that played regularly called Mondo Duo. We played for Ted Nugent while he ate a steak at the Coach House Inn on Colley Avenue in Norfolk one night.
In 1990 we moved back to Carolina and I put 200,000 miles on the old Ford Ranger commuting to Virginia to gig. The early morning trips down the Dismal Swamp Canal Bank got old after three years so I formed Eddie Lee and the Bulldozers with David Ziemba and Jason Hurdle. We did a few gigs and called it quits when I opened Crossroads Music in Elizabeth City in '94. I took a hiatus from playing music until I came across the guys in Out 'n the Cold around 1997. I was learning to play the mandolin and they didn't have a mandolin player, so I joined and have been with them ever since. I also play with Tommy Hartley in Slowhand-A Tribute To Eric Clapton
In my spare time, you can find me at Crossroads Audio Video & Communications in Hertford NC. Come by and say hello�or better yet, come and see Out 'n the Cold LIVE!! |
