Chris Smither has been Peter Mulvey’s mentor since back in 1993, when a young Mulvey opened for the already seasoned Smither. The blues and folk legend liked what he heard and enjoyed their similarities in creativity and quirks; he took that young man on the road with him. Their musical partnership has survived the digital age, the pandemic, parenthood, and the indictment of a former president. Along the way each has worked to influence their best habits and life lessons on the other. As far as mentor-mentee relationships go, this one is for the history books.
https://thebluegrasssituation.com/read/basic-folk-chris-smither-peter-mulvey/

CHRIS SMITHER

Born in Miami, during World War II, Chris Smither grew up in New Orleans where he first started playing music as a child. The son of a Tulane University professor, he was taught the rudiments of instrumentation by his uncle on his mother’s ukulele. “Uncle Howard,” Smither says, “showed me that if you knew three chords, you could play a lot of the songs you heard on the radio. And if you knew four chords, you could pretty much rule the world.” With that bit of knowledge under his belt, he was hooked. “I’d loved acoustic music – specifically the blues – ever since I first heard Lightnin’ Hopkins’ Blues In My Bottle album. I couldn’t believe the sound Hopkins got. At first I thought it was two guys playing guitar. My style, to a degree, came out of trying to imitate that sound I heard.”

In his early twenties, Smither turned his back on his anthropology studies and headed to Boston at the urging of legendary folk singer Eric von Schmidt. It was the mid-’60s and acoustic music thrived in the streets and coffeehouses there. Smither forged lifelong friendships with many musicians, including Bonnie Raitt who went on to record his songs, “Love You Like A Man” and “I Feel the Same. (Their friendship has endured as their career paths intertwined over the years.) What quickly evolved from his New Orleans and Cambridge musical experiences is his enduring, singular guitar sound – a beat-driven finger-picking, strongly influenced by the playing of Mississippi John Hurt and Lightnin’ Hopkins, layered over the ever-present backbeat of his rhythmic, tapping feet (always mic’d in performance).
https://smither.com/press-kit/biography/

PETER MULVEY

Peter Mulvey has been a songwriter, road-dog, raconteur and almost-poet since before he can remember. Raised working-class Catholic on the Northwest side of Milwaukee, he took a semester in Ireland, and immediately began cutting classes to busk on Grafton Street in Dublin and hitchhike through the country, finding whatever gigs he could. Back stateside, he spent a couple years gigging in the Midwest before lighting out for Boston, where he returned to busking (this time in the subway) and coffeehouses. Small shows led to larger shows, which eventually led to regional and then national and international touring. The wheels have not stopped since.

Nineteen records, an illustrated book, thousands of live performances, a TEDx talk, a decades-long association with the National Youth Science Camp, opening for luminaries such as Ani DiFranco, Emmylou Harris, and Chuck Prophet, appearances on NPR, an annual autumn tour by bicycle, emceeing festivals, hosting his own boutique festival (the Lamplighter Sessions, in Boston and Wisconsin)… Mulvey never stops. He has built his life’s work on collaboration and an instinct for the eclectic and the vital. He folds everything he encounters into his work: poetry, social justice, scientific literacy, & a deeply abiding humanism are all on plain display in his art.
https://www.petermulvey.com/#home-section

Peter Mulvey is a veteran singer and songwriter from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He began his career on the streets of Dublin, Ireland, as a busker, and from there moved on to performing in the subways and streets of Boston, Massachusetts. This led to his first record deal and a leap to full-time national and international touring, beginning in the early Nineties.

Mulvey is an iconoclast within the singer/songwriter world. Restless and inventive, he has made seventeen records, spanning rock and roll, folk, Jazz, spoken word, and Americana. A long-standing gig at the National Youth Science Camp led to a spoken word piece, “Vlad the Astrophysicist”, which became a TEDx talk, and then an illustrated book. In 2007 he began an annual late summer tour by bicycle instead of by car and airplane- the 10th annual bicycle tour will happen this September. He has taught songwriting and guitar workshops at the Swannanoa Gathering and at various folk festivals across the U.S.

Mulvey continues to tour, playing over a hundred shows a year as he has for the past twenty five years. This is the core of what he does: music, in a room, performed for a live audience.

View Mulvey at Passim.