Michael Jerling

Acoustic guitarist, singer, and songwriter Michael Jerling plays an artful mixture of blues, traditional and modern folk songs, jazz-flavored folk and country-folk. Unlike a great many other dyed-in-the-wool folkies, Jerling considers blues and early rock and roll & roll to become types of folk music. Also unlike therefore a great many other folk performers, Jerling also admits that this musical approach of the solo singer-songwriter having a acoustic guitar bores him. Jerling requires his acoustic guitar playing and performing cues from music artists as varied as Robert Johnson, Hank Williams and Chuck Berry. Given birth to and elevated in Illinois, Jerling started playing music in senior high school and went to the University or college of Wisconsin at Eau Claire. Like fellow folk vocalist John Gorka, he helped operate a coffeehouse during college, but drifted from college. After he relocated from Illinois to NEW YORK, he quickly founded himself in the first 1980s folk/coffeehouse picture in Greenwich Town and was area of the “Fast Folk” folk music cooperative. After becoming area of the “New Voices, New Visions” folk music tour in 1992, he received the “New Folk” songwriting competition at Kerrville Folk Event in Texas, becoming a member of at the very top crop of singer-songwriters who’ve received that award before (Nanci Griffith, Shawn Colvin, and Lyle Lovett). Jerling makes his house in upstate NY. He offers two self-produced recordings, Blue Heartland and Best of Fool’s Hill, in addition to two albums for the Newton, N.J.-centered Shanachie Records label, My Bad Twin (1992) and Fresh Suit of Clothes (1994). My Bad Twin, his Shanachie debut, was documented at a variety of studios with a variety of backing music artists, including Peter Ostroushko, Robin and Linda Williams, and previous David Bromberg sideman Peter Ecklund. Both of Jerling’s Shanachie produces showcase his outstanding talents like a guitarist and his mastery of several indigenous musical forms, including blues. Lately, Jerling released In Another Existence in 1997, for Waterbug Music.