After graduating, I moved to Long Island, where I had the incomprehensibly good fortune to meet and make music with Ernie Sykes, Sr. (Ernie's son, Ernie Jr. was Bill Monroe's last bass player). Ernie Sr.is a native of Bluefield, Virginia, an incomparable singer (on parr with Bobby Osborne), a consummate teacher and band leader, and a real gentleman. I learned vocal phrasing and part singing as a member of Ernia's Suffolk County Boys.

After picking and singing with Ernie for a few years, I moved to Connecticut. In a parking lot jam at a Country Gentlemen bluegrass festival, I met Tom, who suggested we get together to make some music. Before long, Last Fair Deal was born. The original members included Bill Dailey on banjo, Robin Kincaid on guitar, Gene Brown on bass, Tom on fiddle, and me on mandolin. From the very beginning, we gave equal importance to vocal and instrumentals, unlike most northern bands who gave far greater weight to picking.

The original LFD perked along for a couple of years with some notariety and a few personnel changes. In 1974(?), we had a major reorganization. Tom wanted to break new musical ground within the traditional string band form. I concurred. I asked my college buddy, Peter Craig, who was in Boston at the time, to join us. "Last Fair Deal II" was born. We soon realized we needed to be doing original compositions, and we wanted to add another voice as well. We advertised in the underground press, auditioned several very strange candidates, and finally found Paul. What clinched the decision for me was Paul's great original song, "Whole New Ride," which became the title cut of our first album. That was about a hundred years ago. And as they say(who are they, anyway?), the rest is history.