Roy Brooks currently has four CDs available on Hobson Dog Records- Spontaneous Guitar, Graveyard Guitar, Alabama Space Monkeys, and Alabama Space Monkeys Explore The Inca Ruins Of Your Mind. Go to www.myspace.com/hobsondogrecords to find out how you can get them. Roy Brooks is also available for solo acoustic guitar concerts in your home or live music venue. Rate for anywhere within 100 miles of Washington, DC is $200. Roy will also travel anywhere in the continental US for $500 plus travel expenses and lodging. Roy Brooks is a guitar player. It is all he does. Roy started playing guitar in 1975 at the age of thirteen. Early on Roy learned to fingerpick while listening to records by Merle Travis, Blind Blake, Charley Patton, and Chet Atkins. Some of his first live performances were on the Taylor Made Opry radio show in Dothan, Alabama. By the end of high school Roy was playing with the Andalusia, Alabama based country band Easy Action and sometimes backed up country singer Hank Locklin. Easy Action's steel player Faron Brewer turned Roy on to the Grateful Dead, Hampton Grease Band, and King Crimson. Roy played with Easy Action on and off until the mid-1980s. While attending Enterprise State Junior College Roy played Holiday Inns and military base clubs all over Alabama and northwest Florida with Southern Breed. Roy also played with Speedy Morris & Southern Impact at various other bars in the northwest Florida/southeast Alabama region. He also played with several other bands whose names Roy cannot remember at the present time. In 1983 Roy moved to Ft Walton Beach, Florida to play with Po Boy Cobb & The Circle C Cowboys who had a house job at El Villas in Mary Esther. Not long after that Roy played with the late Tennessee fiddler Nyman Furr & The Little Juice Band and took up drinking tequila. Roy would live in Ft Walton Beach two more times before the end of the eighties playing in lounge bands with keyboard player Steve Kilgore and sometimes with former Little Juice Band drummer Larry Hughey. For a brief period Roy played with Roger Strickland's band Prizm. Around this time Roy Brooks was playing all over the southeast. From 1987 to early 1988 Roy lived in Marianna, Florida and played with Bill Chain's band and later Mr Natural. When Roy moved to Ft Walton Beach the last time in 1988 he started playing with Cornbread Davidson, another Little Juice Band alumni, in his band Shaky Ground. With Shaky Ground Roy played in Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, Iowa, Wisconsin, South Dakota, and Montana. Eventually Roy found himself living in Lexington, Kentucky working a temporary job and occasionally playing music. Not prone to sit still in one place Roy joined the Navy. Unfortunately this was the only time Roy was not actively playing in bands. While in the Navy Roy was on the USS Semmes DDG-18 and USS Mount Baker AE-34, both homeported in Charleston, South Carolina. After serving in the Gulf War Roy got out of the Navy in 1993. Pretty soon after that Roy was playing with the country band Broken Spoke and later blues band Mick Mercury & The Meteors. He also played a few gigs with Juke Joint Johnny and Walkin Mike Wolk. From 1995 until early 1999 Roy played with Smoky Weiner & The Hot Links. While playing with Smoky Weiner Roy recorded "Gunfight On Folly Beach", a spaghetti western instrumental that had local airplay and was featured on Millennium Music's CD sampler of local bands. With Smoky Weiner & The Hot Links Roy stayed busy playing in almost every place you could play music at in Charleston, South Carolina and occasionally traveling to Savannah, GA, Wilmington, NC, and into Virginia. Smoky Weiner & The Hot Links opened for Delbert McClinton at the Wilmington, North Carolina blues festival. Early in 1999 Roy quit his last day job and went back into playing music full time. For a short time Roy played with Rochester, NY-based Buford & Smokin Section around Charleston and in upstate New York including Rochester's Dinosaur Bar-B-Q. From 1999 until 2004 Roy was in the house band at Momma's Blues Palace in downtown Charleston, South Carolina. When Momma's closed Roy played with party band Second Wind, Flatwoods Salamanders, Skye & The Sputniks, Decorated Dirt, Smoky Weiner & The Hot Links, and some duo gigs with his friend John Krucke. While still in Charleston Roy Brooks wrote a guitar method book, The Guitarist's Manifesto, which sold out its first pressing. Last year Roy's wife Michelle got a job as a chemistry professor at the University Of Maryland. And since then Roy and Michelle have been living in Beltsville, Maryland. For a few months Roy was in the house band on Monday and Wednesday nights at Chick Hall's Surf Club in Bladensburg, Maryland. He briefly played with the late Richard Marcus and with country band Billy Clements & The Pickups. Now Roy plays with Bo Weevil & Rottin Cottin and is in the Thursday night house band with Chip Clemmer and Chris Hall at the Sapphire Indian Restaurant in Laurel, Maryland. Roy collects old guitars. You can contact Roy at
[email protected] or you can call him at 301-937-2140. Roy Brooks is available on a per night basis as it fits into his schedule which is slowly but surely filling up. Roy likes to travel. So if you have a band that needs a guitar player to go on the road for a spell Roy just might do it.
