In the fall of 2002, during a major change in my life, I started writing song lyrics. One of the subjects I was drawn to was Kansas history and particularly from 1850 to 1890’s. The biggest problem with my songwriting endeavor was I did not play an instrument. I had recently seen Pastense, a local bluegrass band, perform at a coffee shop in Topeka. The fiddle player, Diane Gillenwater was exceptional. I knew her father, a fellow artist. So I called Diane, and arranged to have coffee with her, to meet her and share my recent writings. We immediately clicked, and she looked at the “song” and said that with a few changes, she thought she could set this to music. I started taking fiddle lessons from her. Not only was I her first student, but I was her first student to flunk!
So I decided to focus on writing. I began to accumulate a lot of lyrics about Kansas and we decided to take it a step further and this was the birth of “Prairie Glimpses - The Kansas Song Project”. We felt this could be a great way to promote Kansas history and inspire others to check out different people and places in our state.
We began to talk to music friends of ours and asked them if they would be interested in either singing or playing on the CD. I had written lyrics for about 22 songs but we eventually narrowed it down to the ones listed here.
The initial tracks to several songs were done by Mitch Rosenow, a producer/engineer in the Kansas City area. He's a native Kansan also and holds Kansas very near and dear. His encouragement and involvement early on were instrumental in this project becoming a reality. As time went on, travel became a problem so we eventually moved the recording to Exceptions Studio in Topeka, owned by Randy Wills.
The 3 year project will be ready for release in early 2007.