This is probably more than you ever wanted to know - and more than I should ever share! Oh well, it's the "personal" page, isn't it? Really, some of the songs (especially from high school) are pretty scary. Read about and listen to my childhood musings at your own risk..

Beginnings
I was born in Ruston, Louisiana and grew up there throughout the seventies and eighties.  My father is a mechanical engineer/singer and I have fond memories of him singing “The Lord’s Prayer” in the local church.  My mother has been an administrator for as long as I can remember and still serves as the Executive Assistant to the President of Louisiana Tech University.  She got me through school and I know she never wants to proofread anything of mine again!  I have one younger sister, Amy. 

When I was about eight years old, my parents provided my sister and me with piano lessons.  Our piano teacher was Cindy Honkenjos and I must have been a tough student for her because I always liked to edit the piano arrangements she gave me to learn.  I learned sheet music more easily if I could also hear a performance of the piece.  I took around five years of formal lessons and then continued creating chord patterns and songs on my own.  I also learned other artists' songs by ear and occasionally played them in public.

Junior High School
Around my seventh grade year of education, I heard about a way of recording my songs using two cassette decks.  It was called “ping-pong” recording.  I talked my father into purchasing for me two identical Radio Shack cassette players, a small mixer, and a Lowery keyboard that had twelve sounds and some cheesy electronic drum patterns.  With this setup, I could record myself playing an idea and add another part to it using the mixer and the second deck as a recorder. I could keep "stacking" in this way by repeating the process. The primary drawback to this way of recording was that each time a new layer was added the final product would become noisier.  This did not matter- I was hooked on recording.  In seventh grade I met a new friend and fellow musician named John Mitchell. He played drums with me in the junior-high school band.   He was and still is a free soul, willing to try anything once.  The two of us loved music with rhythm and when rap went mainstream we followed it.  I’ll never forget that first Run DMC album I purchased in 1983!  We recorded several songs together using the "ping-pong" method. Later when we were freshmen in high-school, he talked me in to entering rap talent shows together where we rapped and danced to tracks we created.  When we were sophomores in high school we even won an award at a local NAACP sponsored college talent show!

During the eighth grade, we moved across town and I met two friends in the new neighborhood, Tracy Calloway and Jim McCorkle.  Tracy and I would hide away somewhere with a recorder and record parodies of commercials and talk shows.  My friend Jim also played the piano and we often played improvised duets.  Both of these guys loved computers.  Tracy was in the TRS-80 “camp” and Jim was in the Commodore “camp”.  I’m so thankful for these guys because not only were they great friends, they also opened my world to the power of the computer.  But remember, we now have more computing power in our wristwatches than these computers had!

I soon wore out my cassette players.  This was good because I had learned of a device called a “four-track” recorder. A four-track recorder is a device that can record and playback four simultaneous tracks by utilizing both sides of a cassette tape as a one-sided tape.  If the recording requires more than four tracks, it is necessary to mix or “bounce’ three tracks to the fourth track, freeing up the other three for more material. Again, I begged my father to help me purchase one, and he finally did. From that point forward my musical life changed. I started using the four-track to record original full-length pop songs about girls I wanted to meet across the street, things I liked, and any general issue a middle-class, rural Louisiana teenager living during the early eighties could encounter.

High School
When I started high school, I met a senior named Lynn Alford.  Lynn’s father was a guitarist in a local band, and he had taken up playing the drums.  We really hit it off and for many years we would get together several times a week to work on music.  He was a big fan of the Elton John/Bernie Taupin songwriting team, as well as other eighties rock bands.  He was especially fond of the theatrics of Kiss.  He started presenting me with his original pop lyrics and poems. Because my lyrical sensibilities were pretty well rooted in the “Oooh Baby, I love you” category, a lyric writing friend was a great thing!  Plus, he wrote about dysfunctional families, moving, changes, and breakups- real life issues.  This is an example what we could accomplish with the four-track during our high-school years. I was much more interested in chords and melodies so we made a great team.  We made forty to fifty four-track recordings together, some horrible ones, some silly ones, and some great ones I still perform today! "City of Angels" is an example of a four-track recording we made during high school that many years later we reworked into "Bright Lights and Alibis" for an album of our music called, “Gypsy Tunes”. We were typical teenagers with secret dreams of fame.  We even created what we imagined our future label would be.  We settled on Albury music- our names combined.  I spent countless hours designing the logo with felt-tip markers and typing paper.  Remember, Photoshop did not exist yet! Lynn introduced me to a friend of his named Michael Lawrence.  He was a great electric guitar player and started adding guitar to our four-track recordings. I also continued to write and record music with John Mitchell.

I remember craving technology as much as I loved writing music.  Call me a geek, but I reveled in opening a fresh, high-bias chrome cassette.  It was a thrill to code in a game out of the back of my Commodore 64 magazine.  In fact, I loved technology so much that I sometimes wrote music as a vehicle for using the technology.  Tracy Calloway (my friend from junior high) and I built a sound/light rig that we used as DJ's for school and other private dances. Later, Jim McCorkle (also from junior high) joined us and we provided music for parties throughout North Louisiana and East Texas. For a bunch of high school kids, we made good pocket change from doing this and we often used it to buy more technology. To satisfy my need to record, I started recording other musicians at my school.  Here's a song from then written by my friend Jim that I recorded with the four-track. Robert Schneider (now of the well-known band Apples in Stereo) also attended my high school and I recorded him playing some of his early songs. His music was so fresh and different from what I knew. A path developing for me, but I did not recognize it yet.

Undergraduate
College was interesting for me.  I had spent my high school years following a path of self-study in combining music and technology.  I had also acquired a couple of synthesizers, a drum machine, and a four-track recorder.  Music Technology programs were extremely rare then and the university in my rural Louisiana town certainly didn’t have one.  This led me to enter the General Studies department.  I figured I would string a few Music, Psychology, Business, and Drama classes together to forge a degree. I took some courses in the Music Department at met a man whom I now consider a mentor.  John Ford was the guitar teacher for the department, but he also had in his living room the only multi-track recording studio in town.  He also had a keen interest in synthesizers, computers, and a new technology called MIDI.  I took independent courses with him while exploring a possible Business Management major.  Mr. Ford enticed me away from Business with a proposal.  He and I would pioneer a new Music Technology degree for the department.  I agreed and started exploring sampling and synthesis, as well as sequencing and arranging.  During my years as an undergraduate, I also kept in touch with my songwriter friend Lynn.  Writing with him served as a creative outlet and gave me something to record. I continued to write and record my own songs and others with some key friends from high school. I utilized the four-track for all of these music recordings- the "digital audio for everyone" revolution was still four to six years away. Toward the end of this period I had acquired an Ensoniq EPS sampler. It had a powerful onboard sequencer and could play eight different timbres at once. For recordings with vocals or live instruments, I recorded the stereo output of the EPS to two of the tracks leaving the other two for vocals. Listen to this selection of recordings I made during college with this equipment.

During my last quarters at the University, I was honored to be asked by the Drama Department to record sounds and/or write incidental music for some of their productions. For example, I arranged all the music for a KCACTF awarding winning musical called High Calibre, by drama graduate student Patrick Daugherty.  As I was about to finish my undergraduate degree, the Drama Department added a new faculty of lighting design named Mark Guinn.  Although Mark had worked primarily as a lighting designer, his mentor was a sound designer and he also had an interest in sound design.  He invited me to join the Drama Department as a graduate student with focus in sound design.  There were no other sound designers in the department, so this became another opportunity for mentored, self-guided study in a field related to my interests of music and recording.

Graduate
I received a BA in music and went directly into the graduate program within the University’s Drama Department.  Mark Guinn was my faculty advisor.  I am so thankful for Mark’s guidance and I consider him my most important mentor.  He allowed me to weave a new path within the department.  I learned a great deal about art, sound, and design from him.  He also seemed interested in learning from me the things I had discovered about music technology.  This was a time for me to synthesize all of my interests into a disciplined art.  I also benefited from direct feedback provided by the Drama Department's audience.  I often sat with the audience during productions and gauged the success of my work by observing their responses.

During my second year of graduate school, Mr. Guinn invited me to work with him as sound designer and composer for the outdoor drama Blue Jacket.  At the time it was a popular attraction and boasted fifty thousand audience members during the course of the summer. I wrote a new score and designed a new playback method for the production.  The experience was vital for me in networking, since so many theatre people are involved with these types of dramas.  Soon I started designing and writing music for other sizeable historical outdoor dramas, including The Legend of Daniel Boone and Shadows in the Forest for Fort Harrod Drama Productions in Harrodsburg, Kentucky. In addition, I developed a relationship with an advertising firm in Louisiana and started writing and recording jingles and production music for them. Listen to this selection of production music written and/or arranged during graduate school or within a two year span after graduate school.

Later
I met Marci Markwell at Blue Jacket.  At the time, she was the director of the production, but had also worked there in other capacities.  She was from Louisville, Kentucky, and had worked at Actors Theatre of Louisville.  We later moved together to Louisville. Based on her prior connections and my developing body of work, I was lucky enough to serve as a guest designer at Actors Theatre of Louisville’s Humana Festival. Marci went on to work as a star dresser and wardrobe supervisor on Broadway during the mid-nineties.

Marci and I are now married.  We've known each other for over a decade and each year we spend together is better than the last. Marci and I have a son named Max Booker. I named him after my favorite New Orleans piano player, James Carol Booker III.
Every day, Max and I spend time playing or listening to music.  He is seven and loves all kinds of music from Punk Rock to Bach.  Max is autistic and has a fascination (among many others) with movie logos; primarily the Pegasus logo of Tri-Star, and the “Lady Liberty” of Columbia Pictures.  As he grows, Marci and I experience the full range of emotions from ecstasy to fatigue. I never dreamed I would be sharing my space with anyone else other than Marci. We love Max very much and he has forever changed our lives. He is needy and we need him equally. My sister Amy Martin, Marci's sisters, Rita and Betty Ann, and my parents Murray and Susan Rasbury are probably some of his best role models. He absolutely adores his "Big Pop" and "Gran" and visits them in Louisiana quite often. Max served as inspiration for me in creating Max Understood, a new musical.

Now
Around 1997, I discovered another aspect of myself as a university teacher.  I returned to Louisiana Tech University and taught theatre courses for the School of the Performing Arts.  After teaching there for seven years, I took a faculty position at University of Virginia in the Department of Drama. I teach sound design and continue working in professional theatre.

Until relocating to Charlottesville, Virginia from Ruston, Louisiana, I had been playing and singing live music inside of honky-tonks around Louisiana and Texas. I mostly performed with a great group of guys called The Lightnin' Bugs but I also played with Monty Russell and Kenny Bill Stinson among others. The members of The Lightnin' Bugs taught me most of what I now love about popular music. We performed our original material at many clubs and festivals, including two performances at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival.

I have always enjoyed variety of interests. Of course, my primary interest remains some combination of theatre, performance, musical composition, design and arts-related technology. Recently, I have also discovered a great love for photography and graphic design. I continue to seek opportunities to experience all of my interests rather than focus on just one.