About Me
First off, I'm not a performer. I don't sing. I don't play. I write.
I truly hope you enjoy the songs, but please don't confuse me with any of the great co-writers or demo singers you're hearing.
Unlike most songwriters, I didn't grow up in a musical household at the end of a dirt lane on the outskirts of Chicopee, Georgia. I was born and raised in South Central Pennsylvania...Amish country...horses, buggies, black suspenders, funny-looking beards and hand-stitched quilts. Not my family, but that was the local flavor, and the inspiration behind my newly assigned nickname, Dutch. More on that in the soon-to-be-written blog.
My father was not a Baptist preacher. He was a mechanic. For UPS. He likes Old Milwaukee and Lucky Strikes. My mother did not play the organ in said Baptist church. She played doo-wop on the radio in the kitchen...while cooking hog-maw (a PA Dutch dish that's basically a pig's stomach stuffed with potatoes and sausage and then smothered in gravy), or pot-pie (not the Mrs. Budd's type that actually looks like a pie, our's is more akin to what I think y'all call chicken and dumplings). I didn't get my start at six years old singing in the children's choir of that same mythical Baptist church. I'm Lutheran...I was an acolyte (no singing! just light the candles, please). I didn't write my first song at 12 when my sixth-grade crush broke my heart. I was something like 32, and had long since given up on Cheryl Conrad (who I saw at the reunion a few years ago, and is still looking fine, I might add).
Even with all of those "not"'s, "don't"'s and "didn't"'s stacked against me, once I wrote my first lyric (no doubt something about drinking Rolling Rock with a bonneted girl named Sarah Stoltzfus in the back of her Papa's "borrowed" buggy) there was no looking back. I was hooked. Thanks, Shawn.
So....here I am, ten or so years later, no longer in PA (moved to Northern VA after graduating from Penn State), but making regular trips to Nashville, meeting lots of wonderful people and....this just in.....starting a publishing company with none other than Mark-Spark-Steven Rudy married his Cheryl Conrad-McGuinn! More on that in the other soon-to-be-written blog.
Now the Eight Inch Jimmy thing...
I know. I know. But that ain't what it means, so get your mind out of the gutter.
I have a weekend home on the Chesapeake Bay, and I spend as much time there as possible. In fact, being out on the boat crabbing might be my most favorite thing in this world to do - even more than cranking up the Buffet, sitting down at the picnic table after a long day on the water, picking and eating the little suckers, and washing them down with a cold Samuel Adams.
A “Jimmy†is waterman slang for a mature male crab.
One that measures eight inches from point to point is a doozie. Big, fat, and heavy.
To me, it’s like songwriting. Just doing it is a blast,
and every now and then you net a great one - an eight-inch Jimmy.
