Arthur Davenport - Singer Songwriter

Arthur Davenport is a musician haling from Maryland.
Biography
Davenport was born in Bethesda, Maryland, in 1957, to a 21-year old naval officer and his 19-year old wife. As a youth he traveled from east coast to west coast and overseas, moving every 18 months to a new town with his father's assignments until he settled down for school in the Washington DC area in 1975, moving there from Frederick, Maryland. His relatives are from South Carolina, so he is related to the place by extraction.
He started playing guitar when his mother bought him a Yamaha FG-160 6-string acoustic guitar for his 16th birthday in 1973. Davenport wrote his first published song "So Near, So Far" the next year using that guitar and has written over 50 songs since then, with 22 songs published on commercial albums.
He dropped out of high school in 1973 and lived on the streets and in half-way houses for over a year, but returned to to high school graduating in 1975, before enrolling at the University of Maryland as an Agronomy major. He studied folk guitar and voice lessons in two classes, but is otherwise an untrained "folk musician".
Davenport played extensively in living rooms, campsites, bus stations, pedestrian malls, back porches, parks, beaches, girlfriend's bedrooms, parties and family gatherings for the first 10 years. Then he went public into the D.C. coffeehouse and brew-pub scene, playing in the shadow of the likes of Mary Chapin Carpenter and Emmy Lou Harris.
He first started playing in the Washington D.C. folk scene in the 1980's and then moved on to the southwest scene during the 1990's while living in New Mexico. He played with a buzz saw hornets nest garage band with fluctuating names during 1991-1993 where he met Jonathan Mayer, the Producer of his first two albums, and the drummer in the bands "Paradise Lost", "Humble Monkey", Lonesome Dove" and the "Good Time Garageband".
The band won a battle of the bands contest, which set off a riot when the drunken fans of the runner up band disapproved, pelting the band, audience, equipment and sound man with liquid, solid and verbal projectiles. It provided an epiphany of sorts, that they were getting somewhere.
The band-incarnations had as many guitar players as names, including an East-German rock-and-roller who did not speak English, and a dyslectic truck driver who had to read sheet music during the gigs, where the band would stop playing while he turned his pages. The band folded in 1994 when Mayer had enough and left to move to a better music scene in Albuquerque.
Davenport returned to his solo act, playing regularly in Las Cruces and Taos. This was a prolific time for composing too, without the distractions of a gigging band.
Davenport's musical career now spans over 35 years of songwriting and performance. He has been featured on National Public Radio performing his song, "Lonesome Cowboy," specially written for a KRWG Las Cruces NM 1994 cowboy music compilation album entitled "'Round-em Up!" Arthur now lives in Hawai'i and has been a house musician for the past 10 years at the Hilo Palace Theater, playing his solo act 3-5 nights a week for 30 minutes just prior to the screening of regularly scheduled "art-flick" movies.
Reviews
This review for his "Reality Bends" album provides a fitting description of his solo style: "Using only an acoustic guitar as backup, Arthur Davenport crafts sparse, haunting folk songs with a wry sense of the absurd. Deftly hopping from one vocal personality to another, sometimes within a line, this far-out mountain man keeps the listener guessing."

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