Hi! My name is Smokey and here is a little bit about myself.

By day I am a mild mannered Network Analyst (I'm from the government and I'm here to help) but by night I become the Man of Steel. I play steel guitar and banjo and have been playing professionally since 1976. I started playing music in Visalia, California in the early '70s. I moved to San Luis Obispo, on the California coast, in 1976 and started playing music for a living. My first full time work was house band in a local restaurant called "1865". That lasted for about six months then I got an offer to play with a band working up and down the California coast called The Brava Band.

A couple of years later I moved to LA (Beautiful Downtown Burbank) and did a bit of road work for various artists. In 1980 I toured in the NW states and Canada with a group called Wild Horse Theater. When that ground to a halt I headed back to sunny California and played around San Luis Obispo with various groups.

In 1983 on a tour of the Great White North, I was asked to join a Canadian group called The Lonestar Cattle Company. We had several records with good airplay and toured back and forth across the Canada with some success. (Very little of it financial)

I finally got tired of bars, hotel rooms and bad food. I settled down in Edmonton, Alberta with a woman, two kids and a mortgage. I used the station wagon to get my equipment to the weekend gigs that I still played.

Now the kids are grown my music career is in full swing and I am doing a lot of shows and studio work with many Canadian Artists.  You can check out some of the artists that I perform with on the My Bands page.

The journey continues....