On his eighth birthday Skip received a copy of “Train Whistle Blues,” the first LP re-release of Jimmie Rodgers, the yodeling Mississippi brakeman, to which he listened constantly, soon mastering Jimmie’s yodeling and guitar style.
Discovering the beauties of old-timey and bluegrass music in his early teens, Skip then turned to the music of Bill Monroe, The New Lost City Ramblers, Carter Family, Stanley Brothers, Ledbelly, and a host of musical icons to drink from a deep musical well.
During the early 1960s Skip was lucky to be growing up in Rhode Island, close to the Newport Folk Festival where he spent time watching and listening to an amazing array of roots musicians including Doc Watson, Maybelle Carter, Bill Monroe, Eck Robertson, Clayton McMichen, Jimmie Driftwood, Mississippi John Hurt, The Stanley Brothers, and many more.
At the age of twelve Skip took up the mandolin, and after meeting Bill Monroe in Newport, he traveled to Fincastle, Virginia to the first ever Bluegrass Festival in 1965. By 1968 Skip was performing at the Berryville (VA) Bluegrass Festival, playing mandolin in workshops with Monroe as well as on the main stage with his college band mates. Art Menius in Bluegrass Unlimited Magazine has referred to Skip as “the finest exponent today of the style of mandolin that was performed by the Monroe Brothers.”
While a student at Brown University, Skip started playing the fiddle style of Gid Tanner and the Skillet Lickers, and also became exposed to the Celtic fiddle styles of the Chieftains, Jean Carignan, Sean Maguire and Aly Bain. In 1970 he traveled to Cape Breton to learn from John Alan and Alec Beaton of Broad Cove Marsh, and in 1973 traveled to Ireland to spend time with Donegal’s Johnny Doherty, Peter Horan, Fred Finn, Tommy Peoples and Seamus Ennis.
In 1973 Gorman headed west to graduate school in Utah where he joined the Deseret String Band and later performed at the National Folk Festival at Wolftrap (VA) and other festivals in the US and Europe. It was in Utah that he began listening to and collecting vintage 78 recordings of the pre-Hollywood working cowboys.
In the 90s Skip’s three recordings of cowboy songs on Rounder Records — A Greener Prairie, Lonesome Prairie Love, and A Cowboy’s Wild Song to His Herd — were hailed by Scott Alarick as the “most flat-out gorgeous cowboy albums to lope down the trail in years.” The Boston Globe has hailed Skip as a “masterful cowboy singer.”
Gorman’s latest recordings are A Herder’s Call, Fiddles in the Cowcamp, and Halloween Hornpipe, Trails, Rails Hills and Tales. “River Stay Away From My Door” – a 50 year reunion with the Rhode Island Mudflaps .
And to much acclaim Skip has just completed a 4-cd set of Celtic Fiddle tunes “CELTIC FIDDLE RAMBLES”.
Through his music, Skip Gorman brings back to life the workaday world of the cowboys of the American West. His music is not the music of the Hollywood cowboy, but rather the simple, yet beautifully poignant music that was performed around campfires by cowboys and westward settlers in the 19th century. Gorman brings to the music a scholar’s knowledge of the cowboy’s Celtic, Spanish and Afro-American roots as well as the personal experience gained by working as a cowboy on a ranch in Wyoming, along with an exquisite touch as a singer, guitarist, fiddler and mandolinist.
Whether solo or with his old time cowboy band, The Waddie Pals, Skip takes the music from one of the most romanticized periods of American history-the days of the cattle drives and westward expansion-strips away the Hollywood glitz and Nashville affectations, and shows us the beauty of the music as it was sung and played along emigrant trails and in cow camps over a hundred years ago in the American West.
Skip is also an acclaimed Bill Monroe-style mandolinist and a fine oldtimey American and Celtic-style Fiddler.
Gorman has performed on Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion, at bluegrass festivals, cowboy gatherings and at folk venues and Celtic music festivals throughout the US and Europe. He also frequently presents programs and concerts at schools and museums, educating and entertaining while playing period instruments. Documentary filmmaker, Ken Burns, has featured Skip’s music in LEWIS AND CLARK, BASEBALL, DUST BOWL DAYS and NATIONAL PARKS. Skip Gorman has released sixteen recordings on the Old West, Rounder and Folk Legacy labels. He is featured on many others.