MySpace a place for friends

"Tom Gray and Mark Johnson are the rusty, banged up Cadillacs of the slide guitar, side by side coughing up smoke and spitting backwoods dirt, but unswerving in their precision and singular style." - Hittin' the Note

The dual slide guitars of Delta Moon carry the listener deep into the heart of the American South, where sinuous Mississippi blues meets the gritty backwoods twang of Appalachia and winds around a rock-steady beat like kudzu on a barbwire fence.

The American Roots Music Association named whiskey-voiced Tom Gray 2008 Blues Songwriter of the Year. His songs have been recorded by Cyndi Lauper (including the hit “Money Changes Everything”), Manfred Mann, Carlene Carter, Bonnie Bramlett and many others. Tom was born in Washington D.C. and grew up in Virginia and Georgia, but home was always the family farm in the North Carolina mountains. In the 1980s he led a rock group, The Brains, that recorded two albums on Mercury Records. Originally a keyboard player, Tom picked up his first lap steel guitar in the late 1980s and hasn’t really put it down yet.

While not born in the South, Mark Johnson did grow up in a trailer park in Ravenna, Ohio. His uncle owned a record store, and there was always music in the Johnson home. Mark played guitar in bands all through high school. In the early 1990s he moved to Atlanta, where he formed a band called the Rude Northerners. About that time he abandoned standard tuning and became obsessed with bottleneck slide.

When Tom and Mark first met in an Atlanta music store, Tom tried to sell Mark a Dobro out of the back of his van. Tom remembers the girl with Mark whispering, “Let’s get out of here.” Mark didn’t buy the guitar, but the two exchanged phone numbers and soon were playing together regularly in coffee shops and barbecue joints around Atlanta. Mark came up with the name Delta Moon after a pilgrimage to Muddy Waters’ cabin near Clarksdale, Mississippi.

When the band added bass and drums and started playing nightclubs and festivals around Atlanta and the South, they quickly gathered a wall full of local “best” awards. After winning the International Blues Challenge in Memphis in 2003, Delta Moon widened its travels to include the US, Canada, and Europe.

Drummer Darren Stanley and bassist Franher Joseph joined Delta Moon in 2007. Darren, originally from Stone Mountain, Georgia, and Franher, from Haiti by way of Jonesboro, Georgia, have played together off and on since they first met in the University of Georgia Redcoat marching band, when Darren played snare and Franher played Sousaphone.

Delta Moon’s latest CD, Hellbound Train, is out now in Europe on the Blues Boulevard label, and is soon to be released in the United States, Canada and Japan by Red Parlor Records.