Sophia Grace "Hightone" Herndon

We celebrate a blessed event.


Please join us in welcoming to the world Joe and Christen Herndon's first child, the beautiful Sophia Grace.


There will now be one more member of the Herndon family hitting high notes at home:



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YouTube Cameo

In around 1972 or 1973, I played at Armadillo World Headquarters with Roy Buchanan. While ego-surfing last night (I do this several times a day), I found this:



Yep, that's me at the beginning of the video saying "Thank you" (I've always been a polite guy) and walking to the side of the stage for a song on which I don't sing.

I can also be seen for a few seconds on the film Striking Distance starring Bruce Willis, which was filmed in Pittsburgh in 1993. I had high hopes that Sony was going to use the song "Eldorado Cafe" in the movie, which we performed live during one of the scenes, and if that had happened, I'd have made a bit of money. But alas, that scene did not make the final cut, although you can see a short glimpse of us if you watch the movie carefully.

However, I don't recommend you do that...

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Welcome Steve Delach!

Our new guitar player in the Billy Price Band is Steve Delach. We've played a lot of gigs this year already with Steve, most recently at J.M. Randalls in Williamsburg, VA, and we're thrilled to have an accomplished guitarist like Steve join up with us.

Steve has been playing guitar all his life. He's a graduate of the Pittsburgh High School for the Creative and Performing Arts (CAPA, where BP Band bass player Paul Thompson now teaches, by the way), and he's been profiled in Guitar World and Guitar for the Practicing Musician. He has written and published two books for Mel Bay Publishing, Getting Into Rock Guitar and Rock Guitar Workout. His third book, Altered States: Applying Diminished and Whole Tone Concepts for Rock Guitar, will be released this year. He's also a frequent instructor at the Duquesne University Guitar and Bass Workshop.

Not only that, but he can play the blues, and he's as funky as he wants to be. We hope you'll come see us soon and welcome Steve to the Billy Price Band!



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Lenny Smith

After 15 years--can it possibly have been that long?--Billy Price Band guitarist Lenny Smith has decided to leave the band. Increasingly during the past couple of years, Lenny wasn't enjoying the traveling we do throughout the year, and he's decided that he wants to be free to pursue some exciting ideas he has to develop in different directions as a musician. I respect his decision, and there are certainly no hard feelings from me or from Lenny. When we talked about it, we agreed that we'd had a great run working together and seeing the band develop as it has, and I wish Lenny nothing but the best, in music and in life.

In the early days of the BP Band, we were sharing Donny Garvin on guitar with Pure Gold, an arrangement that didn't always work out so well for us. It was around then that a friend of mine told me about this great blues guitar player who had grown up in Muscle Shoals, Alabama and, for some reason, wound up in Pittsburgh, and he urged me to check him out. Lenny's Muscle Shoals pedigree certainly got my attention, and it wasn't long before I contacted him and invited him to play a gig with us. Not long into that first gig, I knew that I had to have Lenny play guitar in my band. Lenny was and is an extraordinary rhythm guitarist, and his solos wrecked the house, every time.

Although I'll miss playing with him, I'm excited to watch how Lenny progresses with music, and I know that we'll remain good friends.



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Porkology

This post builds on my last post about blue-eyed soul in Pennsylvania.

I always thought that one of the reasons I did well in Pittsburgh after I started playing here was that the local disk jockeys had worked so hard during the 50s and 60s to build an audience for R&B, blues, and soul. And the king of all the Pittsburgh DJs was and is the great Porky Chedwick, the Daddio of the Raddio.

Sometime in the mid 80s, the KRB and I went into the studio with Porky and produced Porkology, a compendium of Porky's many rhymes and signature aphorisms. Think of it as an early rap record, set to a great James Brown groove by the inestimable KRB. The sax solo is by Don Aliquo, Jr.

We offer it here for free in mp3. Hope you dig it!

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