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SWH: The first band I had was kind of funny because I’m talking 1964/1965, and there were two

bands in town. Of course, now I live outside of a town called Corning, New York. It’s a relatively
small upstate New York town. Of course, now you turn around, pick up a rock and there’s 9 guitar
players under it. But back then, there were only a couple of bands and one was called The
Castleman. The first band I was in was called The Fabulous Ferns, and we were more the rough
and ready Stones kind of guys. We were doing, I guess you’d call it ‘frat’ music back then. It was

blues-based. The Ferns was the band I had for a number of years. There was a block of time when I
really wasn’t playing in a lot of bands. I was
still playing a lot and jamming with friends,
but I was involved with young kids at home and
that kind of thing. The next band that I really
threw myself into was called Blues Plate
Special, and it is special. got together in the

early 90s, and there was a harmonica player
named Ray Pettis, and he and I had been
playing together through the 70s and 80s,
doing local jams and kind of throwing stuff
together here and there, and we decided we

wanted to get serious about it and I knew a
bass player name John Wisor, who I was
playing with in the 60s and asked if he was
interested in playing blues because both Ray
and I, that’s all we were doing at that point. We
were doing a lot of duos, acoustic duos, with
him on harmonica and me on guitar and we put

Blues Plate Special together as sort of a classic
harmonica band and we recorded, I believe,
four or five CDs with that project, mostly
original material.

We had a blast with that, just a great bunch of
players, and it wasn’t until that band had been together close to 30 years, that people in the band

really were less interested in playing out than I was. I really wanted to do more and to work more
and they were all kind of getting a little older and long in the tooth, as they say, and they were
getting a little more comfortable staying close to home. And that’s when a few years ago I decided,
okay, I can’t just have a band of the same three guys because where I live — see that’s the other
problem, I live in upstate New York and it’s not a major metropolitan area and finding musicians,

there’s a lot of players and a lot of good players but finding players of the calibre that I wanted to
play with regularly was a challenge. So, the idea of The Strays came along to me one day, and I’ve
got to come up with a back-story about how that happened because I can’t really remember
[chuckling]. The Stratcat Willie thing had been a moniker of mine for many years, actually back in
the early 90s, and I decided if I call it The Strays, it kind of fits because it really is a bunch of
musicians and it varies. This is kind of an alley full of strays that I tapped into [chuckling] for gigs.
They’re all fabulous players and they’re all guys I’ve been playing with for years, and that’s how I

finally ended up with this particular project that I’ve really been invested in, mostly probably the
last three or four years.