I moved to NYC in 1981 to pursue a PhD in Poetics at NYU. I was very young and very green, but the songwriters who lugged their guitars from the Cornelia Street Songwriter’s Exchange, to the open mics at Folk City and the Speak Easy welcomed me to the Greenwich Village scene and started helping me to hone my craft as a writer and performer. I was quiet, serious and shy, but Christine Lavin encouraged me to keep coming back to the open mic and Rod MacDonald coached me on expanding my musical palette to include more up-tempo songs. I listened carefully to Suzanne Vega, David Massengill, John Gorka, Shawn Colvin and of course Jack Hardy, but also dozens of other denizens of the Village. Within a year, I got my first song recorded on Fast Folk Musical Magazine and my first gig opening for Jack on a Sunday night in March 1983. I joined the staff of Fast Folk as an associate editor, helping put together dozens of issues over the next decade and recording a bunch of songs almost as soon as they got written. I took guitar lessons with Frank Christian, and for a short stretch performed with Richard Meyer, Josh Joffen and Judy Zweiman as Folkano. In 1987 I released my first LP, The Strong In Spirit, produced by David Seitz and recorded by Mark Dann. In the years that followed I made 4 additional albums with these two wizards either recording or producing: Barehanded (1991), Mozart’s Money (1996), Rocket Science (1998) and Dad (2010). I was also fortunate to get noticed by Paul Rostetter at Brambus Records in Switzerland, who made several European tours for me between 1997 and 2002 and put out the album Big Red (2000). I got to be Connecticut’s official State Troubadour 1999-2000, but only because they never listened to the songs I was actually writing about the state at the time.

After two years as an English professor and almost a decade touring full time and making CDs, I got into UConn School of Medicine, and for the last 13 years I’ve been working as a family physician in Hartford and as a member of the Med School faculty. I teach med students and residents in between delivering babies, directing hospice teams, and caring for everyone else for everything in between. Along the way I got married to a very patient partner and have two sons in their twenties. These days, I mostly play violin in a large community klezmer group out of Nu Haven. and perform a few local bandshell and benefit concerts each year, usually with my quartet, The Faithful Sky.


Visit:
https://hughblumenfeld.com