Kristi-
I was born and raised in Whitesville, Kentucky population one thousand. I have 9 siblings and 2 parents. We lived a few miles outside of town on a big working farm. My parents raised kids, tobacco and vegetables. My dad (Stub) was a brick layer at the local Steele Mill for 30 years and he also learned how to build houses. He was and still is a hard workin' man. I am so proud that Stub is my dad. He is a good good man.
My mom whose nickname is "Hootie" stayed at home with all of us throughout our young years. She worked hard around the house and farm. She canned food for the winter all summer long from things that she grew in the gardens. She also had many many flower gardens around the yard. It was and still is breathtakingly beautiful!
One thing I will never forget is her effort to make sure that she was always there when we left for school and that she was right there when we got home. Perhaps one of the many blessings of my life. My mom is where I get my music from. She would to sing to us with her guitar all of the time and still does to this day. She has a beautiful pure mountain sound to her voice. Most of us kids learned to sing and play instruments and we began to play in Church. Not many churches probably had banjo and fiddle music but St. Mary of the Woods in Whitesville, Kentucky did and still does. I began writing my own songs around the age of 18 and I kept it up and finally took a job in Minnesota on a youth ministry team where I was asked to be the lead musician for the team. I kept writing and singing and I began to really have a vision that this is what I wanted to do for a living, but I didn't know how to make this happen. I stayed in Minnesota and had odd jobs for the next few years. Meanwhile, I kept writing my own music. I finally was led up to northern Minnesota around the year 2000 for a summer job. Not long after that I somehow crossed paths with Jeff Kellogg owner of Jimmy's Family Restaurant at the time. I'll let him pick it up from here...
Jeff-
My family is originally from Austin Minnesota. My dad Jimmy and his brother opened their first restaurant at the age of sixteen. It was called "The Oak Grill". The restaurant business was all I had ever known up until the time I met Kristi. When I was a Junior in highschool my parents decided to move us all up to northern Minnesota to a town called Hackensack. We had a cabin on Ten Mile Lake and we built a Deli style restaurant in town called Jimmy's Deli. Then we later started Jimmy's Restaurant in a town just a few minutes away called Walker located on beautiful Leech Lake. My mom Karen has played the piano by ear all of her life. She is a very talented lady. That is where my passion for drumming must have come from. After being in the family business for 20 years or so I really wanted to do something different. The winter of 2000 is when I met her. Somehow Kristi and I crossed paths and we began playing music together a couple of nights a week. Finally it became clear to me that we should quit our jobs and pursue music full time....so we did. Since then we have been signed to 2 Independent Record Labels, SPIRITWOOD MUSIC of Northern Minnesota and now BELL BUCKLE RECORDS of Bell Buckle, Tennessee and Kristi landed a publishing deal from Criterion Music.
We have traveled all over this great country playing our music. California, Oregon, Montana, North Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, New York, Pennsylvania and Florida. It has been amazing and one more great thing came out of this...our marriage. God willing, she and I will celebrate 9 years this Christmas...yep, Christmas Day! Life is good!
THIS OUR STORY
