I am a musician, a songwriter, a performer, an arranger, and a musical director.

I learned to play the piano when I was four. My first piano recital was when I was eight after a Little League baseball game. I had to change clothes in the car on the way from the field to the school. I loved the applause.

I learned to play the guitar when I was eleven. I saw The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1964. I picked up a guitar the next day. A girl riding her bicycle down the street stopped to listen to me play the one chord I knew – D. I really learned it when I took a guitar to camp after the 6^th grade. Tim Hunt, Rick Lovett and I learned to play four songs together at camp. We formed a group – The Red Barons. I was twelve. From there, I learned to play every Beatles song on guitar or piano by listening to it on a record or on the radio. I learned the guitar shape for B7 sooner than Paul McCartney did.

I learned to play the trumpet in 6^th grade and played it through college. I could also play the baritone horn – a horn in the same register as a trombone, but it had valves instead of a slide. I played it through high school.

In college, I took a class in classical guitar and learned how to read guitar music. I watched James Taylor and Neil Young on TV. I watched their hands. I went to Stephen Stills concerts and Cat Stevens concerts and watched their hands with binoculars to see how they formed their chords. I learned to Travis finger pick and could play complex folk songs. I was one among my peers that could read the music and the chords. I learned some open tunings.

I paid attention to the orchestra parts in Beatles songs, and took an orchestration class in college. I learned the different instruments and how they sounded separately and together. I learned that if you put a muted trumpet together with a flute, it sounds like an oboe if you don’t have an oboe player. I started analyzing orchestral music to see how it was constructed. We had to write twelve bars of music and orchestrate it. It would be played by the school orchestra. I wrote 64 bars in the library with no piano; I just heard everything in my head. I took two years of theory classes and learned just enough music rules – don’t write parallel fifths, you must resolve the seventh and never double the third of the chord – to break every single one of them.

Here’s something that you may not know about musicians. If you go to a restaurant with a musician and music is playing in the background, the musician will listen to the music instead of listening to you. The melody, the instrumentation, the arrangement and variations in tone. It’s unavoidable. A musician always has some song running through his or her head. They do not need a radio playing in the background. They live to an ongoing soundtrack. The music app Shazam was quite useful. One time, I was in a restaurant and heard a song I had not heard in 35 years, since high school, but I could not remember the name of it. It was ‘Reflections of My Life’ by Marmalade. Thank you, Shazam.

Along the way, I have learned to play the following instruments: piano, acoustic guitar, trumpet, baritone, piccolo trumpet, bass guitar, electric lead guitar, harmonica, drums (poorly), various percussion instruments, laptop slide guitar, organ, various synthesizers, and banjo. I have learned to program a digital audio workstation, using plugins to achieve almost any sound of any instrument that I can dream about, and do it well enough to produce mixed and mastered recordings.

I have played in the following groups: The New Folk Singers, Prism, A New Song, The Doug Hanks Band, The Silverados. I have led music at dozens of camps for thousands of people. I have traveled the United States on someone else’s dollar to play music. I have led churches, camps, and conferences in the worship of God. I have shared the stage with Tim McGraw, Sheila E., Dion, John Michael Montgomery, Montgomery-Gentry, and Michelle Pillar.

I have written many songs. Right now in the “My Songs” folder on my computer, there are over 500 songs. I have published songs with Maranatha! Music, Dawson McAllister’s “How to Get Along with Your Parents” video series, and self-published maybe 100 songs. I have recorded six album projects – one in Nashville in 1981, released in 1982 that played in 55 markets across the U.S. and charted in Los Angeles, Little Rock, and Tampa. My songs can be found on all streaming platforms.

And I did all of this because God created me with a little bit of musical talent and the ability to put words to music and make people feel something. I merely became the steward of the gift and used it to the best of my ability.

(Pictured: The Red Barons L-R, Mark Smith, Rick Lovett, Doug Hanks, Tim Hunt, 1966.)