Ethnomusicologist Dr. Craig Morrison’s specialty is popular music and its sources. From Victoria B.C., he settled in Montreal in the 1980s. He has taught at Concordia and McGill, lectured for various institutions, and written two books and several articles for encyclopedias. The first book was Go Cat Go! Rockabilly Music and Its Makers (University of Illinois Press, 1996). The second was an A to Z encyclopedia: American Popular Music: Rock & Roll (Facts on File, 2005). His PhD. thesis was Psychedelic Music in San Francisco: Style, Context and Evolution (2000). As a performer and bandleader, Morrison has recorded 11 CDs, and produced 24 annual Roots of Rock and Roll shows, each with a different theme, at the Oscar Peterson Concert Hall.
Age 16, here I am with my first guitar in the basement of the family home in Victoria. The plastic of four of the tuning pegs on the guitar had crumbled off and I had to tune the strings with a pair of pliers. The mic stand is the handle from a floor sweeper and the mic is from a reel-to-reel tape recorder, held in place by an elastic band. On the wall are the four portraits of the Beatles that were included in the White Album. The good old days!