I was born & raised in Springfield, Illinois, the Land of Lincoln. I started playing guitar and writing songs in my early teens. In high school I played in punk rock cover bands with names like Flawless Ketchup, Suburban Rebels, and The Jetsons.
In 1983 I moved to Des Moines, Iowa. By the fall of 1984 I had formed The Hollowmen with Mike Sangster, Eric Svenson, and the late Joe Page. After a couple of years Eric left the group and Jim Roth joined. The Hollowmen were together until the fall of 1989, writing tons of songs, playing a lot of gigs, and releasing two LPs. We shared stages with well-known bands like Sonic Youth, Big Black, Screaming Trees, and Died Pretty, and became good pals with the Chicago bands Eleventh Dream Day and Friends Of Betty. On one Chicago trip in 1988, we sat around the living room and listened to Janet Bean and Cathy Irwin sing a couple of the early Freakwater songs. In retrospect, this was a pivotal moment in my eventual conversion to country music.
Also during these years I recorded my first two solo records, under the name The Humpback Wail. Neither record was ever released. The tapes are in a filing cabinet in my office, if you’re interested.
After the Hollowmen petered out, I moved to Iowa City and began working on a BFA in studio art. Sick to death of playing rock music, I fished around for a different direction. My interests diverged wildly into free jazz and improvised music on the one hand, and classic country music on the other. I messed around with both, until it became clear to me: I was a lot better at singing Webb Pierce songs than I was at Sonny Sharrock-style guitar, or Milford Graves-style drumming!
I moved to San Francisco in August, 1994, and within a few months had seen both Junior Brown and Wayne Hancock play live. That cemented it. If they could play classic country music that well, and make it that fresh & interesting at the same time, so could I. It took me a few years to get it going, but by 1998 I started work on my first CD, “Tom Armstrong Sings Heart Songs,†and put together a band to play my original material live.
I released the CD on my own Carswell label in 1999 and it did better than I expected. In 2000 I recorded my second CD, “Songs That Make The Jukebox Play,†and in 2003 I licensed both records to Spit & Polish for UK/EU release. Sad to say I haven’t had the opportunity to make another record since, but I hope to remedy that one of these days.
The CDs got me some nice attention. I was profiled in a few publications, like No Depression, Country Music People, and Blue Suede News. The Third Coast Music reporting DJs voted me best male vocalist of the year in 2002. I played showcases at SXSW and the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival. I placed a couple of the songs in an independent feature film, “By Hook Or By Crook.†And in 2003, I toured the UK, sharing the bills with John Miller and his Country Casuals.
In 2000 I moved across the bay, from San Francisco to San Leandro, to buy a home and start a family. After the UK tour I took a few years off from music, to concentrate on my day job prospects and my home & family. In the summer of 2006 I decided the time was right to get back into it, in a new capacity. I joined Smelley Kelley’s band, the Plain High Drifters, playing bass and singing harmony. Late in 2007 that band took a hit when two members left, so I recently joined the Burning Embers as their bass player. But I have a big stockpile of unrecorded material that’s too good to go to waste, so keep an eye out for me. I’ll be doing my own thing again sometime soon.
