Thursday, April 28, 2005
Saving grace
From The Columbia Daily Tribune
Robert Randolph credits the steel guitar with saving his life. Randolph said that while growing up in Irvington, N.J., he witnessed his neighborhood slowly deteriorate from a pleasant one to a place riddled with violence and drugs.
And Randolph says there was a time when he was part of it.
"We’d go to parties. A fight would break out. A couple of guys would get shot," Randolph said of his high school years in his official bio. "I was a bad kid, on my eighth life with only one left to go."
But Randolph also was a member of House of God Church at Orange, where his father was a deacon and his mother a minister. And it was there that he first played the steel pedal guitar.
"I spent hours practicing it," he said. "It became my everything."
Read the article
Columbia Daily Tribune
Robert Randolph credits the steel guitar with saving his life. Randolph said that while growing up in Irvington, N.J., he witnessed his neighborhood slowly deteriorate from a pleasant one to a place riddled with violence and drugs.
And Randolph says there was a time when he was part of it.
"We’d go to parties. A fight would break out. A couple of guys would get shot," Randolph said of his high school years in his official bio. "I was a bad kid, on my eighth life with only one left to go."
But Randolph also was a member of House of God Church at Orange, where his father was a deacon and his mother a minister. And it was there that he first played the steel pedal guitar.
"I spent hours practicing it," he said. "It became my everything."
Read the article
Columbia Daily Tribune
# posted by Dave Sichak @ 9:39 PM 
