Description

In this musically infused and engagingly narrated oral history, guitarist, songwriter, and musical educator Jimmy Dillon recounts his devotion to music since the age of 12 when he decided he wanted to be a guitarist. Born in 1951 in Los Angeles, "in the golden age of rock 'n' roll," Jimmy moved to Michigan with his family as a teenager, where he started gigging with his first band, The Fugitives. In 1969, after finishing high school, he moved back to California with his sister Chloe, settling in Sausalito. Jimmy dates his "love affair with Marin County" back to this moment. He recalls the music scene of the early 1970s in San Francisco and Marin, as well as his own first bona fide Marin band, The Edge. Jimmy recounts his 20-year musical relationship with Clarence Clemons and his deep love of the blues, which prompted him to write a play (or "bluesical") entitled Ascension of the Blues, documenting the West African origins of the blues, its maturation in the United States, and subsequent diffusion throughout the world. Throughout this oral history, Jimmy describes how his career in music has taken him around the world, how he moved back to Michigan and later to Maui, but how, through all these migrations and displacements, Mill Valley - and Mt. Tam - continue to pull him back and occupy a special place in his personal geography. This oral history concludes with a brief guitar lesson on how to play a turnaround in the blues and...

Record Contributed By

Mill Valley Public Library

Record Harvested From

California Digital Library