"He's got a great heart and I would trust him with my life, I think you can trust him with your stage. One of the 10 best singers of Traditional Music." Utah Phillips
Musician Mark Ross
Playing the gamut of American Roots Music, from hobo ballads & train songs, blues, western swing, mountain ballads, fiddle tunes, raucous banjo melodies, and early jazz to the works of contemporary songwriters
According to Mark Ross's website he left at home at 17 because of illness, his parents were sick of him. In 1967 he hung out in Greenwich Village playing coffee houses where there was no cover and no pay. He says he became a professional house guest doing 4 to 5 sets seven nights a week yodeling, singing, cracking bad jokes, making execrable puns, and picking up a storm. He hung out with the likes of Blood Sweat & Tears, Richie Havens, Janice Joplin and Jerry Jeff Walker. I first met Mark in the late 1970s in Missoula, Montana. At one point he lived above Charlie B's in a small room on Higgins Avenue in the Zoo. As a musician he has learned to play approximately a dozen instruments including guitar, banjo, fiddle, harmonica, mandolin, Hawaiian guitar, autoharp, Jews' harp, bass, dulcimer, tenor guitar, & 12-string guitar in varying degrees of proficiency. He has plied his singing and playing across the continental U.S. in bar rooms, ball rooms, coffeehouses, union halls, hobo jungles, kitchens & living rooms, bedrooms, grade schools, colleges & universities as a guest lecturer on American folk music, railroad songs, labor songs and the History of American Labor and radical politics, folk festivals, concert halls, street corners, railroad stations, and bus depots. Mark stated his website hadn't been updated for awhile but cites a working repertoire of close to 500 songs that run the gamut of American Roots Music, from hobo ballads & train songs, blues, western swing, mountain ballads, fiddle tunes, raucous banjo melodies, early jazz to the works of contemporary songwriters. A consummate Tramp by his Brethren of the Road, at times he has turned his hand to such odd jobs (and there are those that say that any job he takes is, by definition, odd) as: logger, farmhand, stagehand, actor, radio & concert producer, short-order cook, substitute teacher in a Catholic High School, director of an after-school program for disadvantaged kids, IWW organizer and running the IWW office in Missoula for 3 years, day laborer, dishwasher, babysitter, and Folksinger-in-Residence at New York Folklore Center. Currently Ross teaches music in Eugene. Ross was a resident of Montana for 23 years spending eleven of those in Missoula doing a live Saturday night radio show for Montana Public Radio between 1997 and 2000. He spent 12 years in Butte, Montana before moving to Eugene, Oregon. He was the Artistic Director and Producer of the Butte FolkFest. Over the years he has shared stages with Utah Phillips, David Bromberg, Ramblin' Jack Elliot, John Hammond, Malvina Reynolds, Jerry Jeff Walker, Steve Goodman, Rosalie Sorrels, Faith Petric, Brownie McGhee & Sonny Terry, Dave Van Ronk, Hoyt Axton, Snuffy Jenkins & Pappy Sherrill, Spider John Koerner, The Rose Tattoo and many more. He has recorded over the years for National Geographic Records, NPR's All Things Considered, Flying The West Old & New Page 6