Craig Bickhardt, a folk/Americana singer-songwriter with major Nashville credits, a poet’s voice, a virtuoso guitar style and a veteran’s experience performs at the Mainstay in Rock Hall on Friday April 23 at 8:00 p.m. Centreville songwriter Joe Smith opens. Tickets are $15.
Native Pennsylvanian Craig Bickhardt’s first big break came in 1982, when he wrote and sang two songs for Robert Duvall’s Academy Award-winning film Tender Mercies, a movie with a similar theme to this year’s award winning Crazy Heart. In the wake of that film’s success, Bickhardt made his move to Nashville where his songs found their way onto platinum and Grammy-winning recordings by legends such as Martina McBride, Willie Nelson, Ray Charles, B.B. King and Alison Krauss. His 800-tune catalog includes four No. 1 country hits — “Turn It Loose” and “I Know Where I’m Going” (recorded by The Judds), “In Between Dances” (Pam Tillis) and “It Must Be Love” (Ty Herndon) and 10 more that made it to the top ten in radio play.
His friends and collaborators have included Thom Schuyler, Fred Knobloch and Don Schlitz, the original Writers in the Round at Nashville’s fabled Bluebird Café. He joined with Schuyler and Knobloch as the band SKB to record No Easy Horses for MTM Records. Three hits came from that collaboration, including Bickhardt’s chart-topper, “Givers And Takers.”
In 2006, Bickhardt left a changed Nashville to return to the concert stage and to his roots in eastern Pennsylvania, and he wowed audiences on the main stage at the 2008 Philadelphia Folk Festival where festival programmers called his performance “absolutely outstanding.”
In a world where everything is disposable from ink pens to diapers to electronic devices, Bickhardt is striving to make certain his music stands the test of time. His latest CD, Brother to the Wind (2009), reveals his strong connections within the music industry and his deep insights that might be lost on country radio. In his Philadelphia Inquirer review, Nick Cristiano wrote, “Craig Bickhardt is back home in the Philadelphia area after 24 years in Nashville, where he penned numerous hits for others. Brother to the Wind shows this songwriter’s songwriter to be as fine an interpreter of his own material as anyone…. After all his years in the big time, he has managed to retain that purity of spirit, and ‘Brother’ keeps it refreshingly real.” Sitting in on nearly every cut of “Brother” are veterans Janis Ian, Beth Nielsen Chapman, Terri Hendrix, Lloyd Maines and a host of others.
“I wanted to include some of the artists and friends I’ve known and respected on this CD,” Bickhardt says, “You get to a point where you realize you don’t have forever in this world. It’s time to do the things I’ve put off, and one of those things is to sing and pick with these great people I’ve met and admired.”
Bickhardt’s songs bring to mind the pioneering era of singer-songwriters like James Taylor and Gordon Lightfoot. “Music used to change people”, Bickhardt notes. “Records used to be made for careful listeners who read the lyrics and talked about the songs… That’s the kind of music I relate to.” The Mainstay’s small intimate space should be the ideal setting for what Philadelphia Daily News reviewer Jonathan Takiff called Bickhardt’s “finely finessed visions in that warm humane Americana territory.”
Joe Smith, a songwriter who lives in Centreville who writes and sings in a warm country voice, opens the show.
The Mainstay (Home of Musical Magic) is the friendly informal storefront performing arts center on Rock Hall’s old time Main Street. It is a 501(c)3, non profit dedicated to the arts, serving Rock Hall and the surrounding region and dedicated to presenting local, regional and national level talent, at a reasonable price, in an almost perfect acoustic setting. The Mainstay is supported by ticket sales, fundraising including donations from friends and audience members and an operating grant from the Maryland State Arts Council. For information and reservations call 410-639-9133. More information is also available at the Mainstay’s website https://www.mainstayrockhall.org.
Larry Ahearn says
I’ve seen Craig Bickhardt many times – this show is not to be missed!!!