About Me
Hello...thanks for stopping by our myspace page. The Convict Hillbillies are a musical entity from South Austin, Texas. However, that is not where our story begins...
The four of us are brothers. We are actually quadruplets!!!! We were born on a small farm outside of Fruitland, Kansas. As you could probably guess, we raised mostly fruit on our farm. Predominantly Fuji and Gala apples, but we occasionally grew wheat, sorghum and legumes as necessary.
When we were 3 years old, our mother moved to Las Vegas to become a dealer at a casino on Fremont Street to earn extra money for the family...at least this is the story that we were told. Thus, it was up to our Dad to raise us.
Our Dad was a dedicated and pious man...he enjoyed Jesus, a well-brewed cup of coffee and reading the Saturday Evening Post. However, Dad also had one other love...fast cars. His favorite TV show was Smokey and the Bandit. In fact, Dad was so dedicated to Smokey and the Bandit that it was the only show he watched. Consequently, it was the only TV show we watched.
Back in those days, Fruitland, KS was primarily a right-wing Christian fundamentalist town with extreme views on popular music. The city actually set up a solar radar shield around the town and its hamlets, which interfered with radio signals so that they were undetectable. Thus, the only song we heard growing up was the theme song to Smokey and the Bandit...Jerry Reed's "East Bound and Down."
When we were 10, Dad bought us some instruments and we began to learn how to play them. We eventually began writing songs, imitating the general style present in "East Bound and Down."
By the time we had turned 12, we had gotten pretty good on our instruments (completely self-taught!). However, big changes were in store. We were forced to sell our land in Fruitland as the U.S. Government claimed our land via public domain. Evidently the Assistant postmaster general for the midwest region of the United States was a fan of apples. A new regional distribution center needed to be constructed for the explosive population growth occurring in Southeastern Kansas and he fancied the idea of having an apple orchard just outside of his office.
We loaded up our family station wagon and relocated to Pecos, Texas where we bought an existing cantaloupe farm that had previously been used as a money-laundering scheme for marijuana smugglers from the state of Michoacan in Mexico. We quickly discovered the joys of FM radio. We got one station and it played both kinds of music: country and western! We immersed ourselves in the works of such western swing luminaries such as Bob Wills, Milton Brown, Spade Cooley and Cliff Bruner.
When we graduated from high school, our Dad paid for each of us to take an educational trip anywhere in the world. Bryan traveled to western North Carolina to study the strange foggy weather patterns of the Black Mountains. Mead visited Beaumont and Humble, TX to research and discover the remnants of the Texas oil industry. Rafa went to Bogota, Colombia to learn about his literary idol, Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Similarly, Sean visited Paris, France to learn more about his literary hero, Guy de Maupassant.
While we were away we all studied the native musics of the regions we visited: Bryan studied the bluegrass of Carolina, Mead the old timey Texas fiddle tunes, Rafa the cumbias of Colombia and Sean the Parisian and Gypsy Jazz of France. When we all returned we decided to teach each other the musical styles we had learned and then moved to Austin, Texas.
