2019 Instructors
Cary Black
Cary Black is a bassist, teacher, vocalist, and producer. Described by Alan Senauke in Sing Out! magazine as “a musician’s musician,” Cary is at home in a wide variety of musical settings.
His performance and recording credits include work with Laurindo Almeida, Ernestine Anderson, Tex Beneke, The Boys of the Lough, Bob Crosby, Nokie Edwards, Dan Hicks, The Kingston Trio, Laurie Lewis, Rose Maddox, Mollie O’Brien, Eddie Pennington, Johnny Ray, Kay Starr, Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson, Ernie Watts, and Claude “Fiddler” Williams.
Cary has toured extensively, appearing at festivals and concerts throughout North America, Europe, and Asia. He has made numerous radio appearances including the Grand Ole Opry and A Prairie Home Companion; and he has performed on the PBS, ABC, Fox, and TNN television networks. During the period when Cary played and sang with Laurie Lewis and Grant Street, the band was awarded the Song of the Year and Entertainers of the Year honors by the International Bluegrass Music Association.
Cary taught music theory and improvisation for six years at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, and has taught upright bass for over twenty years at the Puget Sound Guitar Workshop. He has also taught bass at the California Coast Music Camp, Greater Yellowstone Music Camp, Bluegrass at the Beach, B.C. Bluegrass Workshop, Sound Acoustic Music Camp, and Wintergrass Academy.
Robert Bowlin
Biography information forthcoming about Robert who will serve as a flat picking guitar instructor
John Corzine
Biography information forthcoming about John who will serve as a guitar instructor
Dave Firestine
Dave Firestine is probably best known as the jam leader at the Carp Camp, an institution at the Walnut Valley Festival in Winfield, KS. The Carp Camp is the center of the universe for fiddle tune jamming, where one can hear Irish, old-time, New England and French Canadian tunes from the crack of noon to the wee hours of the morning. Dave’s style is eclectic, incorporating a blend of old time and Irish styles. He is especially fond of tunes that have a unique twist, or sets that introduce interesting changes of tempo or keys to perk up the listener’s ears.
Dave plays mandolin, banjo, bouzouki, bodhran, and guitar with several bands, the best known of which is Steam!, a high-energy, versatile contra dance band.
As a Roster Artist for the Arizona Commission on the Arts, Dave teaches workshops in schools. He also co-hosts the Tucson Irish session and old time/contra dance music session and leads jams and teaches workshops at the Tucson Folk Festival, Sharlot Hall Music Festival, the Dewey Dulcimer Festival and the CTMS Summer Solstice Music Dance and Storytelling Festival.
Lewis Mock
Many campers saw Lewis’s smiling face at the camp for several years, whether hanging or jamming on the deck, playing swing or bluegrass, or killing it at the honky-tonk jam.
What they might not know is that he’s one of Colorado’s leading musicians. For over 25 years, he’s led La Taverne Orchestra at the Broadmoor Hotel, the oldest 5-star hotel in the US. He’s performed with Melissa Manchester, Maureen McGovern, and Suzy Bogguss, as well as Jim Hall, Elvin Bishop, Linda Purl, Jim Salestrom, and Nelson Rangell. In his more than 11,000 gigs, he’s played just about every style of music there is.
Gretchen Priest
Gretchen Priest divides her time between performing, teaching fiddle and running the Musical Heritage Center of Middle Tennessee (also known as the Fiddle and Pick) that she founded in 2008 in Pegram, Tennessee, just west of Nashville. Her school teaches traditional acoustic instruments with a staff of 35, many of whom are among Nashville’s leading recording and performing professionals.
Gretchen, along with her husband Tim May, formed the band Plaidgrass by merging the traditions of Irish, old-Time and bluegrass music and the instrumentation of fiddle, bouzouki, bodhran, bass and banjo in a variety of configurations. Prior to opening the Fiddle and Pick, Gretchen toured with the bluegrass band Crucial Smith and the Celtic rock band, Ceili Rain. She is often a featured performer on the Grand Ole Opry, Mountain Stage, the Walnut Valley Festival in Winfield, Kansas, and many festivals across the country. (Last update 2018)
Raul Reynoso
Guitarist, singer and composer Raul Reynoso was born in Los Angeles, California. He started playing bluegrass guitar in 1974 and soon acquired the skills that would earn him two California State Flatpicking Guitar championships as well as many Western regional titles. Today, he is most noted for his expertise on acoustic guitar and mandolin with a mastery of styles ranging from bluegrass and western swing to ‘30s jazz in the tradition of the legendary Django Reinhardt.
Raul first rose to prominence in the band of banjo virtuoso Larry McNeely, and his three-year stint with the band included one recording and two appearances on the Grand Ole Opry. The release of Raul’s CD “Royal Street” brought him international acclaim from jazz reviewers in the US, UK and Europe. The instrumental and compositional skills displayed on his CD have solidified his position as one of the world’s greatest guitarists. Music critic Jim Hilmar said “When it comes to guitar styles, Raul Reynoso’s clean, lithe, articulate picking technique is to die for.”
Along with John Jorgenson, Raul is one of the pioneers of the Gypsy Jazz movement, and has been nominated Instrumentalist of the Year three times by the Western Music Association.
Raul has taught privately for over 35 years, and has done workshop and clinics for the last fifteen. He’s done workshops with John Jorgenson for the JazzMasters Workshop, as well as bluegrass workshops with Dan Crary, John Moore, Beppe Gambetta, and Steve Kaufman.
Cindy Scott
Cindy Scott’s path has been, well, different. Raised in a family of musicians, her first instrument was flute, which earned her a scholarship to Louisiana State University. She went on to get an MBA and learned to speak German and Spanish along the way. During a study abroad program, she began singing in the jazz cellars of Germany with local musicians. Back in the US, she climbed the corporate ladder for a while, but in 2005, left a successful business career for a musician’s life in New Orleans, where she promptly lost all her household belongings to Hurricane Katrina. She decided to stick around and has since become firmly rooted in the rich music scene of the Crescent City.
Cindy maintains an active performance schedule in New Orleans and elsewhere. She has performed in cities all over the US and Europe and in more exotic locales like Mexico, Turkey, and Kazakhstan. Her recording “Let the Devil Take Tomorrow” won OffBeat Magazine’s Best Contemporary Jazz Album award for 2010, and All About Jazz said of her, “The Devil may take tomorrow, but … Cindy Scott clearly owns today.” She is currently working on her fourth album, which will reflect more of her singer-songwriter tendencies.
Cindy is also a respected voice instructor of many styles. She has taught contemporary voice at both the University of New Orleans and Loyola University, and as of 2016, Berklee College of Music. She’s taught a myriad of professional vocalists, and was hired to coach Oscar-winning actor Octavia Spencer and actor-comedian Russell Brand. One of her former students, Jon Cleary, just won a GRAMMY™ for his recording “GoGo Juice.”
…and Roots Camp founder Charlie Hall was proud to claim her as his cousin.
Cosy Sheridan
Cosy Sheridan has been called “one of the era’s finest and most thoughtful singer-songwriters.” She first caught the attention of national folk audiences in 1992 when she won both the Kerrville Folk Festival’s NewFolk Award and The Telluride Bluegrass Festival Troubadour Contest, then released her critically-acclaimed debut CD Quietly Led on Waterbug Records.
She has released nine CDs, her music is featured in the Robert Fulghum multi-media novel The Third Wish and she tours consistently throughout the US. Her concerts are wide-ranging explorations of modern mythology (meet Hades the Biker), love songs for adults, contemporary philosophy for the thoughtfully-minded and her signature parody on aging and women. Throughout this journey, her lyrical dexterity is backed by her distinctive, percussive bluesy-gospel guitar style.
A guitar student of instrumental luminaries such as Guy Van Duser and Eric Schoenberg and a voice student at The Berklee School of Music, she brings a depth of experience to her craft. For the past 18 years, she has taught classes in songwriting, performance and guitar at workshops and adult music camps across the country including The Puget Sound Guitar Workshop and The Swannanoa Gathering. In 2008 she co-founded The Moab Folk Camp.
Doug Smith
Doug Smith, winner of the 2006 International Fingerstyle Guitar Championship, weaves together folk, classical, jazz and contemporary forms into a unique, flowing fingerpicking style recalling the playing of Chet Atkins, Leo Kottke, Michael Hedges, and Alex de Grassi. Of his playing, Billboard writes “Inviting melodies… stunning fingerpicking”; Fingerstyle Guitar magazine raves “Smith’s fretboard brilliance continues to dazzle.”
He’s been heard nationwide on radio and TV, including The Discovery Channel, Martha Stewart Living, CNN, TNN, ESPN, and Encore. He also played guitar on the soundtracks for the movies Moll Flanders, Twister, and August Rush.
Doug has released six of his own albums, and in 2005, he earned a Grammy award for his role in the album Henry Mancini: Pink Guitar along with a Who’s Who of fingerstyle guitarists including Laurence Juber, Pat Donohue, Ed Gerhard, Mark Hanson and William Coulter.
Steve Smith
Steve Smith is not only known as one of this country’s top mandolin players but also as an outstanding educator. Along with his work with the Roots/Bluegrass group, The Hard Road Trio, Steve has been on faculty at a host of camps. He’s appeared at some of the country’s largest festivals and venues including Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, High Mountain Hay Fever, RockyGrass, Swallow Hill, the Freight and Salvage, Oklahoma International Bluegrass Festival, the Big Horn Mountain Festival, and the Minnesota Old-time and Bluegrass Festival. With the Las Cruces (NM) Symphony, he has performed works of William Grant Still, George Gershwin and George Crumb and music from the show “Chicago.”
In his thirty years of touring, he’s also performed in Ireland, Germany, France, Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Cuba and the US Virgin Islands. He has also performed in musical theater in Cotton Patch Gospel (multi-instrumentalist, vocalist and actor) and the Robber Bride Groom; he composed and performed the score for a production of the Sam Sheppard play “Curse of the Starving Class.”
Steve has appeared on over 30 albums as performer and producer with musicians including Jim Hurst, Mitch Perry, Tim May, banjoist Bill Evans, Alan Munde and Tim O’Brien. His music has been heard on countless radio stations across the US and on the Discovery Channel, The History Channel and even the Weather Channel.