Born Roy Alan Bookbinder in Queens, New York on October 5, 1943, he took up the guitar following a tour of duty in the U.S. Navy, after acquiring his first instrument in Italy and returning to New York. A student and friend of the Reverend Gary Davis, whom he met in 1966 and with whom he also toured during the late 1960s, Book Binder launched his career during the folk and blues revival in New York’s Greenwich Village, where he was a frequent participant in open mics hosted by Dave Van Ronk, The Mayor of MacDougal Street, In the early 1970s,Book Binder recorded Travelin’ Man, his first solo acoustic album on Adelphi Records, left his abode in the Village, and began rambling around the world. A real road warrior and contemporary itinerant bluesman, he traveled extensively across the U.S. in a motor home, while also playing festivals and other gigs around Canada, Europe and Australia. The Travelin’ Man and The Book, as he was alternately known, also joined Bonnie Raitt on an east coast tour and toured with Jorma Kaukonen (who recorded two of Book Binder’s songs – “The Preacher Picked the Guitar” and “Another Man Done A Full Go Round,” and invited him to teach guitar at his Fur Peace Ranch — which he did for some 20 years). During the late 1980s, Book Binder made nearly 30 appearances on Nashville Now with Ralph Emory on cable TV’s The Nashville Network (TNN).

A resident of St. Petersburg, Florida, Book Binder was a consummate entertainer known for his distinctive fingerpicking style and slide arrangements, along with his captivating storytelling. His engaging concert and festival performances were punctuated with humorous anecdotes and personal stories.

“I don’t play gigs in places where I wouldn’t go socially,” Book Binder once told thecountryblues.com. “I don’t play the bar blues scene. It’s not my thing. I am just a folk player. Until I started my own label, I didn’t know you could make money from selling records. I had recorded plenty of times, but I never got paid by the labels. So I started my own.”

Although Book Binder helped to keep old-time folk songs and the Piedmont blues tradition alive through the decades and had a vast repertoire, he also wrote and recorded his own songs. Beginning in the late 1990s, he released albums on his own independent label (Peg Leg Records) after having previously recorded for Adelphi, Blue Goose, Flying Fish, Kicking Mule, and Rounder Records.

Book Binder — who died just days after one of his acoustic blues and roots music contemporaries, John Hammond — leaves behind his second wife, Nancy, whom he married in 1999, his brothers Michael and Paul, and a vast repertoire of music and memories.

Your newest recording, Ordinary Cats, features you on electric guitar. When you wrote the songs, did they just scream for a more electric sound?

Originally, when I started the CD, I was thinking of a really stripped down guitar and vocal sound. But these things have a way of developing organically, and one added instrument sound often begets another. When we added the drums to a few of the tunes, it just pushed the music in a direction that I decided to embrace instead of fighting. I’ve always played the electric guitar on the side — more in the last 15 years or so — on other people’s recordings and shows than on my own, so it was pretty easy to add it to this recording. I have a whole set of electric guitar influences that don’t really have to do with my acoustic guitar influences, so I think it works fine to have “two” of me on some of the songs.

Was it your intention from the beginning to make this a more rootsier album than your past recording ventures?

Well, we started working on two projects at the same time — the live album with my group — which became The Kress Sessions [released in 2011] and the beginnings of Ordinary Cats [just released]. I decided to put the more ragtime, swing-influenced songs on the live one and make that one sound different from the studio album. Probably, if anything, it is the lyrics that set the songs apart. They both sound pretty rootsy, in my opinion — I just indulged my classic rock background a bit more on Ordinary Cats. It was a conscious decision not to use the exact same instrumentation on it as in the last few albums. So a different backing vocal sound was key to that. And not using as much dobro and harmonica gave us room to experiment with more keyboards and multiple guitars, and with mandolin tracks.

Tell us about the other players on Ordinary Cats.

FJ Ventre played upright bass and electric bass and co-produced the album with me. He engineered the whole project and did a great job. The main male backing vocalist was Greg Humphreys, a buddy of mine and talented singer-songwriter who has a very cool husky but high vocal style. The female backing vocalist was Lizzy Ross, who is a great young talent also from North Carolina. Pete Connolly, from the alt-folk group Birds and Arrows, played the drums on several tracks; his sound helped define our arrangement decisions going forward from there. Danny Gotham played mandolin and mandola, adding nice textures to the guitar parts. The keyboards were added by Wes Lachot and Lindsay Rosebrock, with Jim Kremidas adding pedal steel to one track also. Our mix engineer was the great Chris Stamey — and he always adds a few little musical doo-dads along the way.

You have cited Neil Young and Stephen Stills as inspirations for the sound on this latest record. What is it about their style that makes its way onto your record?

I have been a big fan of Neil Young, Stephen Stills, CSN (& Y), and Buffalo Springfield since I was a kid. I think it was those fringe suede leather jackets that piqued my interest. I used to always ask my parents to stop at Deerskin Trading Post on Rt. 1 in Danvers, when we were on our way to Boston for things, just so I could look at those coats. I finally did get a used one when I was in my 20s in a shop in Asheville, NC. Now I can’t wear it because you need a certain amount of hair to pull off that look. I’m hoping my daughter will discover that jacket someday and make it her own . . . but I digress. . . . Anyway, Stills and Young both did a lot with Drop D tuning and drone strings, and with certain musical modes. Not to get too music-geeky, but I use the mixolydian and dorian modes a lot in my playing, and I’m sure that’s influenced by those guys. When you cross in the blues- pentatonic style influence, it’s like a weird cross between Celtic folk music and American blues. I am interested in exploring that mesh.

One of your career highlights is that you were an International Blues Challenge finalist. Please tell us more about that competition and what you played when you became a finalist.

The International Blues Challenge thing was fun. FJ Ventre and I decided to enter the local competition here in the Triangle. I never entered it before because I’m not crazy about the idea of music as a competition. But we thought it might be fun to try and see if we could get a free trip to Memphis out of it. We won our local contest and then went to Memphis to compete against the winners of all the regions — people who had won their contests in California, Mississippi, countries in Europe, Australia — you name it. There were 60 acts competing in our division (the solo/duo division) and we were divided into 6 venues of 10 acts each, playing two nights in front of two different sets of judges. We won our venue and then went to the finals on the third night in the Orpheum Theater — the last six acts remaining — quite an honor. We played my original songs — “Ten Days,” “Full Bloom” (an anti-war song), an Elvis song that FJ sang as our tip of the hat to Memphis, and probably something else that I can’t remember right now. We didn’t win. The emcee said to us as we left the stage “You were my personal favorite act.” But we probably didn’t win because we were too “folky.” I think I’m considered a folk musician by the Blues crowd and the Folk Alliance people think I’m the blues player in the room.

You’re so well known for being such a great fingerstyle guitar player. How does it feel to be up on stage and have so many people staring at your hands?

I always thought they were checking out my legs! It’s fun — I like to ask if there are other guitar players in the room — because I use a lot of open tunings and play slide, etc. And being a teacher, I enjoy sharing the information and letting people in on what I’m doing.

I love asking traveling musicians about life on the road. If you had to write one of those Reader’s Digest essays about the most memorable person you met while touring, who would it be about?

I think it would end up being a novel instead of a Reader’s Digest piece… We have met so many memorable people on the road over the years, both onstage and off — people who I love to see every time I visit a town and people I’m hoping never to run into again. Lots of people have been kind to me and my musical compadres — putting us up in their homes, feeding us, and sustaining us. And there have been real evil shits out there, too, though I don’t run into them as much in the folk world as when I was playing rock clubs in my youth. Rather than naming any of the shits, I will tip my hat to some of my favorite people. As far as other musicians I’ve had the pleasure to meet and play with, some folks who have really been gracious and supportive to me have been Roy Book Binder, John Hammond, Jorma Kaukonen, Amy Ray. . . . The list of generous hosts, venue owners, friends, and family is far too enormous to elaborate on, so at the risk of leaving anyone out in print, I’ll suffice it to say that I am in great debt to many!

To learn more about Jon Shain, visit his website.

Hailed by The New York Times and other media outlets as “one of the outstanding exponents of the Piedmont style guitar,” Cephas was first exposed to the blues by his aunt while he was growing up. Although born in Washington, D.C. on Sept. 4, 1930, Cephas was raised in Bowling Green, a community from which he derived his nickname. There he learned from his grandfather the folklore of eastern Virginia — where his ancestors had toiled as slaves — and about the blues from his guitar-playing aunt. Listening to the blues as a child, Cephas sought to emulate the records he heard and, guided by a cousin, learned to play the guitar by ear.

While influenced by music from the ragtime era and such early regional blues artists as Blind Boy Fuller, Rev. Gary Davis, Blind Blake and Blind Lemon Jefferson, Cephas developed his own soft, delicate, alternating thumb-and- finger-picking style reflecting that of the Piedmont region – the foothills between the Appalachian Mountains and the Atlantic Coastal plain that extend from northern Virginia to Florida.

Cephas met his self-taught harmonica-playing musical partner, Phil Wiggins, 25 years his junior, during a Washington, D.C. jam session in 1977. Through the years, the duo recorded for a number of labels and played hundreds of major festivals, concert halls and even living rooms. They toured the world and were the first American artists to perform at the Russian National Folk Festival in Moscow during the days of the old Soviet Union. In 1987 they were hailed as the W.C. Handy Blues Entertainers of the Year. With a musical repertoire comprised of classic country blues and originals judiciously chosen to reflect the cultural and historical content of the Piedmont blues, Cephas and Wiggins sought to ensure that their live performances conveyed a sense of life in the post-Reconstruction South.

“The blues is a creation of black people in communities all across this country when times were bad,” Cephas noted in a bio that appears on the official Cephas and Wiggins website. “It was a way of expression, an outlet, and it’s had so much impact. Blues music is truth. The blues are true-to-life experiences that everyone can relate to.”

A recipient of a prestigious National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts, Cephas also served on the executive committee of the National Council for the Traditional Arts, founded the Washington, D.C. Blues Society, and had a signature Taylor acoustic guitar named after him. However, “More than anything else,” he once stated, “I would like to see a revival of country blues by more young people … more people going to concerts, learning to play the music. That’s why I stay in the field of traditional music. I don’t want it to die.”

John Cephas may have left us, but there are other artists on the circuit today seeking to ensure that the music he so loved never does.