Born December 4th, 1951 in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
Living most of my early life in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I began playing guitar in 1961 due to my Father being an amateur musician and my mother a church pianist/organist. I am totally self taught with no formal musical education. In some ways I blame this on my 6th grade music teacher Mrs. Brown. I remember that year that I made A's on all my tests and did all of my homework yet at the end of the first semester I received only a C on my report card. I asked her why and she said something like "Oh, I don't think you tried hard enough". Well, my thought then was why try at all and told her that since she thought I wasn't trying hard enough, after all I did, I decided not to join the school band that she had been coaxing me to join. I didn't really need coaxing as I had intended to join anyway, until I received that lower grade than I deserved.
During the mid 1960s through the mid 1970's I played in various Rock bands. One band called 'Family Tree' was based in Tulsa but traveled a lot during the early 1970's mostly playing in Texas, Arkansas and Mississippi. Our repertoire featured some of the more melodic instrumentation of The Moody Blues, King Crimson and Pink Floyd avoiding most of the 'heavier' forms of music. It was through these bands that I developed an interest in musical composition. We began writing our own material which was a little 'out-of-the-norm' for most people but we didn't seem to care. We had our own little Rock Opera called 'The Astral Travels Of Starworm' with lyrics written by our good friend Terry Funk. Later Funk wrote a long poem called 'He-Wolf, She-Wolf'. After I read the poem I sat up all night and wrote music for it. The song 'He-Wolf' is where I came up with my pseudonym 'Herbert
Edgar Wolfe'
In 1973 the band packed up everything and moved to Seattle, Washington at the urging Mr. Funk. I don't know if that was a good idea in retrospect. Because of the depressed economy at the time it was difficult to find gigs. We dropped our rock format and began playing jazz under the name 'The Nyghtgalan Quintet'. This was good for me in that it got me to start examining musical structure again. I had to learn to read Charts and chord diagrams and as I result I wanted to learn all I could about chord forms and how they are used
After a twelve year hiatus from the music business and a failed marriage I purchased another guitar (the day my divorce became final) and began visiting various blues jams in the Dallas area. Noticing that there were an extremely large number of very talented guitarist I decided to switch to the Bass guitar just so I could get work. After some coaxing, I convinced Brian 'Hashbrown' Calway to hire me as the house bassist at the long running Schooner's Blues jam. During the years from 1990 through 2004 we hosted in excess of 2000 blues jams. At one time we were doing 4 jams per week plus hosting other jams about once per month. That totals out to almost 250 per year and these did not include regular performances.
Through all this I became a closet composer. I purchased a copy of Sibelius Scorewriting Software which has greatly simplified my work. In 1999 I released a self-published CD on MP3.com called "He-Wolf, She-Wolf" which was a mixture of some of the music I wrote for the Funk poem plus other compositions. I released it under the 'Electronic Classical' genre since it was entirely composed and recorded on my home computer using Cakewalk Pro Audio 9. At one point it was the best selling Classical CD on MP3.com but that didn't last.
In early 2005 I was approached by Rick Phillips (actor/stuntman Walker Texas Ranger, Home Improvement) to write the music for his low budget film called 'Bobby Speaking'. The movie has since been completed but alas is frankly not that good but it was a nice first attempt. The music on the other hand has had a lot of positive comments. You can listen to some of the songs by visiting my website at http://terrygroff.com/music
The latest project completed is the soundtrack for the Documentary " Le Strade Di Parma "
