Biography

Boyd's Eleventh Release is A True Americana Gem. Blues to Bluegrass features tributes to Robert Johnson, Bill Monroe and Earl "Lightening" Scruggs, some of the Founding Fathers of Blues and Bluegrass. Their talent and music paved the way for generations to follow and will remain long after we're gone.

Hello, I'm Jim Boyd, a singer/songwriter from the Lakes Band of the Colville Confederated Tribes in Washington, State. I'd like to introduce you to my new twelve-song release Blues to Bluegrass. Although I'm not really a Blues or Bluegrass musician, I love both genres. And this new recording isn't really just blues or bluegrass, but it was a lot of fun for me to write and produce these songs.

Songs like the title song Blues to Bluegrass, which is a music history song per se. I recorded all the instruments and vocals on that song in my own Rez Recording studio, but I did use a couple other recording studios and musicians for other songs. One was Black Coffee Recording, where we first started the project several years ago. I recorded two songs in another Spokane studio called College Road Recording.

I was very fortunate to have great musician friends record with me like my buddy Alfonso Kolb who's been my good friend and drummer for many years, and there was also Brad Greene, an outstanding piano player, and Marty Meisner who played many bass parts. We had guests such as Paul Raymond, a percussionist for the Spokane Symphony, and LaRae Wiley who did background vocals on a couple songs.

I've been known in the past for doing mostly native oriented music, and although this recording is outside of my norm, I still included a pretty rocking song about a native legend called the Stick Indian, which is a legend on different reservations of various forms depending on who you talk to about the subject. We also have a video of the song that's a lot of fun.

There's also a song about Coyote, another legend with many stories throughout the native world. This song Kyo-t's My Name is a little more contemporary version of a coyote story.

Alaskan woman is a song about Alaskan native actress Irene Bedard, who I'm very proud of, as she's such an inspiration to so many people.

There is a song called Same Old Door that sounds like a good love gone bad, but is actually a song about leaving alcohol behind. This song is also special to me because of the beautiful piano performance by Brad Greene.

Then we have a song about peace called Too Much Violence In Peace that I wrote several years ago, but as some of the other songs, just released this year.

Well, there's a little bit of information about some of the songs on my new recording Blues to Bluegrass.

Jim Boyd

Other award winning and award nominated albums by Jim Boyd include “Live at Two Rivers” and "Harley High", an album dedicated to Jim's lifelong love of riding Harley Davidson Motorcycles. www.HarleyHigh.com