Chuck LeMonds: Biography
Chuck LeMonds has been writing songs and performing for the past 30 years and continues to do so from his home near Graz, Austria. In April 2006, he released his 6th recording Pink Roshi, recorded with his Austrian band in Vienna during the previous year.
In the USA, he is known to a circle of music lovers who, over the years, have continually collected his recordings. „Mississippi Angel“ is his newest studio project, recorded in 2008 and is his 7th. He is working currently on his 8th studio project, which he is recording in the tower of an Austrian castle where he has set up his studio. It will be recorded partly in Austria and then tracks added in Wisconsin, USA with musicians that Chuck has played and toured with during his 30 year music career: mandolinist and guitarist Chris Silver, singer,cello and bass player Mary Gaines and her partner violinist, singer, mandolinist, multi-instrumentalist Chris Wagner. For the first time Chuck will be presenting the work of Belarussia born guitarist Arkadiy Yushin. The release is planned for the winter of 2010.
Chuck LeMonds was born in St. Louis, Missouri and grew up between the noise of urban excess and the rural pastoral settings of Maryland, where he lived as a boy in the servants quarters of an old plantation, and later in the Appalachian Mountains, and amongst lakes, rivers and dairy farms of Wisconsin.
Chuck's mother Marilyn was a talented singer, piano and clarinet player whos desire to become a professional musician, was put on hold forever, when her first child was born at the age of 16. The 11 children benefited greatly from her love of music. All the children learned to sing, and most learned to play an instrument. Musicals, gospel, folk songs, as well as songs that were heard on the radio at that time in the late 60s were sung.
Chuck, perhaps the most shy of all the children, was the only one to go on and have music play such a central role in his life. At the age of 13, Chuck LeMonds family moved to the Appalachian Mountains near Front Royal, Virginia. Here he heard Bluegrass music for the first time. He borrowed a banjo from his brothers friend and started learning from records, until he discovered Earl Scruggs standard work, which became his bible.
At 15 he got a guitar from his mother for his birthday. She sent him to the car to get something and there it
was lying on the back seat. It was a great joy. Songs from Dylan, Young, Guthrie, as well as the Stanley
Brothers followed. Between the age of 15 and 30, Chuck LeMonds lived mainly in Wisconsin in old farm houses and on communes. At 18, he started writing his own songs and played in many different folk and bluegrass groups. They played mostly between Minneapolis and Chicago and all small towns in between. Festivals and small clubs, live radio programs with and without audiences.
At the age of 22, a dear friend of Chucks who had lived many years in Europe, encouraged Chuck and a friend Tim Haub, to go to Europe and play on the streets. Six months later they were standing on the streets of Munich playing to the crowds. It was there that Chuck played a request of a John Hartford song on banjo for Mary Chapin Carpenter, then still unknown. Its still a huge mystery how he travelled for 3 ½ months carrying a banjo, a guitar and a very heavy backpack while hitching and riding trains. Upon returning to Wisconsin via New York, Washington D.C., and thumbing from Washington, getting a ride with Mike Seeger and spending a few cold nights at the Hope Rescue Mission in West Bend, Indiana, Tim and Chuck lived out the cold Wisconsin winter eating the yield from their garden they planted before embarking on their world tour: red beets, carrots and lots of potatoes. Many trips to Europe followed.
In 1991 Chuck LeMonds moved to Austria to live. He lives currently in east Styria, not far from the borders of Hungary and Slovenia, with its rolling hills, a view of the Alps and vineyards. Chucks band, sometimes known as The Impermanence, has been together for 8 years. They travelled to the states in 2000 for two tours, but play mainly in Austria and Germany.
Chuck LeMonds and other musicians
James Browns’s funky drummer
Clyde Stubblefield, songwriter/guitarist
Willy Porter, bassist
David Bell; drummer
Alex Deutsch; bassist
Peter Herbert; guitarist/songwriter
Ripoff Raskolnikov; songwriter/guitarist
Gottfried D. Gfrerer; flutist
Peter Phippen; jazz violinist
Randy Sabien; drummer
Reinhard Winkler,
Flow Bradley, songwriter
L.J.Booth, percussionist
Ismael Barrios, drummer
Gunter Grasmück, jazz violinist
Bernie Mallinger, electric guitarist
Klaus Ambrosch, blues guitarist
Howard “Guitar” Luedtke, Singer/Mandolin
Chris Silver, Singer,Cello and Bass player
Mary Gaines, Multi-Instrumentalist
Chris Wagner, bassist
Walter Kreinz, bassist
Herfried Knapp, Singer
Livia Hubmann, trumpeter
Freddie Lang, multi instrumentalist
HuberDohr, saxofonist
Robert Cooper, singer/songwriter
Georg Altziebler
Chuck LeMonds: Discography
Chuck LeMonds: Diskographie
Die Alben im Überblick
* 1988: "Here and Then, There and Now"
* 1989: “Hearts of 1905”
* 1994: "Color of the Sun”
* 1996: "For a Moments Gain"
* 1998: "Road To Limbo"
* 2006: "Pink Roshi" 2008: "Mississippi Angel"
Martin Krusche: about Chuck LeMonds and his music
In the noise and howl of the mainstream scene, it’s easy to not hear the many tones and shades of root music in America that aren’t about the lifestyles of the rich and famous. Rather about life. No, not a single life style, but the many life styles, a variety of hard contrasts. These stories want to be told. Because every human community would collapse if the story tellers were forced to be silent. A songwriter is only one of many voices in this chorus. But a voice with very special possibilities. Because writing songs requires a “special set of circumstances”. And many different talents must come together. Talents that can give a common meaning to all the indisputable opposites: searching and finding, knowledge and doubt.
For thousands of years, we’ve had a cultural tradition, whereby we don’t want to be taught or instructed to, but rather, to be moved and our hearts touched. We want to be informed in many different ways: What happened?
All passionately told stories in someway ask this question: What happened? What that means is: What can be experienced? And it whispers: What is life? They who listen carefully will perhaps come to the conclusion: We don’t struggle to find concrete answers. To raise such questions and to exchange them with other people….that’s what these moments are about! Because answers, to an extent, are found in life itself. But such moments are also about the questions and that they never stop being asked. And so it is with the root music in America. In this way new songs are continually created. People and their destiny are to varied, that all stories could have been told. Diversity: Like it influenced Chuck LeMonds childhood.
Through urban life in inner city St. Louis, Missouri. In the southern state peacefulness of an old plantation in Maryland on the east coast. In the rural Appalachian Mountains of Virginia. Through Wisconsin winters. The songs of this musician are not “advice for the weary”. Taking an example from Chuck’s childhood, such as how you jump a freight train in a way so as not to lose your legs…. This cannot be explained verbally, it must be shown. Like Chuck’s father did with him.
But how a life on the road under the open sky looks…that doesn’t get shown to you….that gets told. It gets sung about. The songs are, to an extent, part of a powerful oral epic, in which people must provide for themselves. LeMonds appears to be someone who, through his writing, continually re-creates himself a new.
One can read it in his songs. And you can hear it as well through the different genres on his newest album “Pink Roshi”. One can still sense the long trail taken from places along the Mississippi River all the way over here to east Styria in Austria.
Life experiences happen out in the world, the songs are their echo.
(Martin Krusche)