Award-Winning Songwriter Dr. Peter "Doc" Stephenson

Dr. Stephenson has been playing music in multiple genres since he was ten (he's 79 now). He is a multi-instrumentalist (keyboards, both electric and upright bass, 6-string, 12-string, doubleneck and harp guitars, mandolin, 8-string uke, and drums). Although he gravitates towards classic/vintage blues and Americana, he has played folk, classical, pop, rock, R & B, jazz, Hawai'ian slack key, and liturgical music. He is a song writer and music arranger and records and produces in his own home studio. He is a finger-style guitarist.

Currently, he plays regularly at venues in Rochester, and Oxford, MI. He also has played open mics and song writers nights in Nashville and Los Angeles as well as locally. While teaching at a university in Vermont, he played regularly at several university and local venues for many years. During his ten years in the US Navy, Dr. Stephenson played jazz organ and fronted a band that played regularly on base and in off-base venues.

His style is decidedly "old-school" but it is his own - he does not try to emulate any artist although many blues men and women of the 30s - 60s have influenced him considerably, particularly Jimmy Smith on jazz organ, Blind Willie McTell and Jontavious Willis for Blues (among many others), and Tyler Childers and Willie Nelson (again, among many others) for song writing.

His PhD is from Oxford Brookes University in the UK and has nothing to do with music. He has been referred to as a "colorful eccentric" which, hopefully, makes him fun, not difficult, to work with.

* From "Statesboro Blues", Blind Willie McTell, 1928