For over half a century, Skip Gorman has enjoyed singing, playing and performing an impressive and varied palette of traditional American and Celtic folk music. As an accomplished singer, guitarist, fiddler and mandolinist, Gorman has completed over 18 recordings of old-time cowboy songs, fiddle, mandolin, bluegrass; has been featured on many others; and established his own record label, Old West Recordings.
In the 1990s, Skip's three recordings of cowboy songs on Rounder Records — A Greener Prairie, Lonesome Prairie Love, and A Cowboy's Wild Song to His Herd — were hailed by Scott Alarick as the "most flat-out gorgeous cowboy albums to lope down the trail in years." The Boston Globe has hailed Skip as a "masterful cowboy singer."
Through his music, Skip Gorman brings back to life the workaday world of the cowboys of the American West. His music is not the music of the Hollywood cowboy, but rather the simple, yet beautifully poignant music that was performed around campfires by cowboys and westward settlers in the 19th century. Gorman brings to the music a scholar's knowledge of the cowboy's Celtic, Spanish and Afro-American roots as well as the personal experience gained by working as a cowboy on a ranch in Wyoming, along with an exquisite touch as a singer, guitarist, fiddler and mandolinist.
His recordings have earned a prestigious NAIRD (INDIE) award, and been selected as a top ten folk pick of the year by Amazon.com. Filmmaker Ken Burns has used Skip's original music on four of his celebrated documentaries (Lewis & Clark, Baseball, The Dust Bowl, and The National Parks: America's Best Idea). He has appeared on Garrison Keillor's A Prairie Home Companion; toured with the US Embassy in Chile, Argentina and Paraguay; performed at World Fiddle Day in Co. Kerry, Ireland; taught at numerous music camps in America and the British Isles; and lived in Utah, Wyoming, and New Hampshire.
"Skip Gorman has mastered the rare sound which can only be created by those who have grown up listening to traditional American folk music."
— Hal Cannon
"The lonesome ache that is in the core of Skip Gorman's voice and fiddling fits close to the bones of the slope country, the rough breaks, the bunchgrass high plains. These traditional cowboy songs, unadorned, openly sad, sometimes lively or gritty, carry the distance and solitude of the West in them."
— E. Annie Proulx
Website: skipgorman.com
