Interview With Bob Boykin: How To Be A Successful Session Musician and Composer

By: Rick Landers

Images: Courtesy of B. Boykin

You may not have heard of Bob Boykin, but it’s a near certainty that you have heard him play. It’s always inspiring and equally uncanny how some guitarists have the creative juice to produce work that can fit into a broad spectrum of the performing arts. Bob Boykin has been a “go to” session player in Los Angeles and Nashville and a performing artist with some of the country’s top acts. He has also written an impressive body of music that regularly finds its way into top television programs and commercials as well as major motion pictures.

The guitarist’s original compositions have added excitement, humor, suspense and mystery to well known television series such as Sex and the City, West Wing, The Chris Isaak Show, The X-Files and more. Boykin’s work adds melodic textures to many major motion pictures including Casino Royale, Twins, Keys to Tulsa, Toy Story and Finding Graceland, to name only a few. And in the world of television, his inventive work has reinforced the persuasive intent for commercials sponsored by Toyota, Ford, Chevy, Levi’s, Budweiser, Miller Beer and a host of other pitches where a punchy guitar hook can help define a brand.

As a session guitarist Bobby’s worked with iconic artists in Country, Rock, Blues, R&B, such as Liza Minnelli, Meat Loaf, Pam Tillis, Dr. Hook (featuring Ray “Eye Patch” Sawyer), Brenda Lee and others. His on-stage and in-session work helped him build not only his repertoire, but served as building block experiences for his very robust career.

Boykin eventually found his way to Los Angeles, where he’s been in demand for years and continues to be considered one of the savviest guitarists who can come up with the right riff or score to complement a scene, a moment, or storyline for world-class feature films.

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Rick Landers: Where did you grow up, and how did you discover guitar?

Bob Boykin: I grew up on a dirt road in South Georgia outside of Savannah on a dairy farm where I lived with my grandparents. We didn’t have music in the house, except we did have a piano that my grandmother would play sometimes, and I played trombone. They were very religious and all that, so I wasn’t allowed to have a record player in the house.

Somehow, and I never told my dad this, but one Christmas after coming home from the Navy, he showed up with a pawn shop guitar that he paid $15 for and an amp that he paid about $5 for and gave them to me for a Christmas present. I knew my grandparents would not want me to have it, so I couldn’t bring the guitar and amp in the house. I had to keep them in a plastic feedbag out at the dairy barn across the road, hidden, and I would sneak out there to practice when I was supposed to be working. I went to a music store and bought myself a Mel Bay chord book and taught myself how to play a few chords. Later, I moved them down the road to a clubhouse at a family pond we had about a mile away so I could play louder and no one would hear me.

Rick: Were you one of those guys who also grabbed the record player, dropped the stylus on the record and learned a couple of licks?

Bob Boykin: Yeah. Eventually I did when I finally got a record player from my mom. I had to keep it with my guitar and amp down at the clubhouse. I can even tell you the first record…and I only bought it because it was on sale at K-Mart for about $2, and it looked cool. It was Johnny Winter And Live concert album.

When I saw the way he looked on the cover, I just thought, “He looks really cool, like some kind of freaky hippy, and he’s probably pretty good.” It was the ‘60s and I was 12 or 13. I had not heard of him before. That was the first record I ever bought. That was the one that got me. When I heard that, I knew I wanted to be a guitar player the rest of my life. It so real for me, something clicked.

Rick: Oh, yeah. He’s a scorchin’ guitar player.

Bob Boykin: Yeah. Man, he blew my mind, especially his slide playing, I really liked it. Like I said, where I grew up it was the Bible Belt and farms. I wasn’t exposed to any kind of music at all other than at church and some records my mother would play when I visited her in the city. She was into Ray Charles, Little Richard and Buck Owens.

I also was exposed to whatever I saw on TV. We had a black and white TV, and could only watch certain shows. When I got that Johnny Winter record I just wore it out day after day. After I got to where I could figure out some of the chords and leads, I would just needle-drop on it over and over until I learned those songs.

Rick: Yeah, I’ve been there. I did that.

Bob Boykin: That’s how it all started.

Rick: At a very young age, you moved into this world of session guitarists. How do you broaden and deepen your musical background to work in that kind of world? It really must demand not only a strong command of your guitar, but the talent to play a lot of different styles.

Bob Boykin: Well, that comes from playing in bands early on, before I got into the studios. I was already playing in clubs by the time I was 15 years old and had my first road gig when I was 16. I was playing in a rock band called Sweet William down on River Street in Savannah at this stripper club called Some Place Else. I wasn’t even old enough to be in there.

I remember The Allman Brothers would come sit in with us on the weekends. I thought it was just because we were good, but they were really coming there to party with Sweet William, who was the leader and played the [Hammond] B3 [organ] in the band. He was Gregg and Duane’s godfather, so he said, from Daytona Beach, where they were all living at the time. There wasn’t much going on there, and it was more happening in Savannah, so they would drive about three and a half hours up the coast to get there. They would come in and sit in with us at the club when they were in town.

I can also remember the Hell’s Angels being there all the time, I never knew why. I was too young and naive and was not allowed into that scene after the gig. But I had a good guess. It was like I had blinders on, all that mattered to me was that I was playing my guitar sneaking out of the farmhouse at night to go play in a rock ‘n’ roll band. Acting out totally against my grandparent’s wishes, it was probably 1967 or 1968. They wanted me to be a farmer and milk the cows, and I tried to, but it was like something else had a hold of me. I couldn’t control it. I wanted to play so bad I would have done anything to get there.

The Allman Brothers were like the number one rock band. I remember they were very big, in the South, especially. We even went out and opened for them at huge stadiums a couple of times on some of their shows. That was a little bigger than what I was used to [Laughs].

Back at the club when they weren’t around, we had many of the older Motown artists that would come to play there. On the weekends they would have a different special guest artist every Friday and Saturday night. Like Johnny Taylor (“Who’s Makin’ Love”), Sam The Sham (“Wooly Bully”), Little Milton, Dee Clark, Johnny Otis (“Willie and the Hand Jive”) were some that came through. Most of them didn’t have their own band, so we backed them up.

I remember my first road gig it was with Sam the Sham. He had a big hit called “Wooly Bully” when I was little. After the show on Saturday night he asked me if I wanted to go on the road and play some gigs with him, I said sure, and I left that night. It was summer so I didn’t have school. I remember he had this old Cadillac Coupe DeVille we rode in. There was this chain of night clubs called Big Daddy’s up and down the coast in Florida we would play. I would go out for a few gigs then come back to the club and play. Then go out again with somebody different next time, it was always different. We played all through the south, like Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Texas, everywhere. It helped me to develop a lot of skills and understand different styles. Since I was a trombone player all through school, I started in the fourth grade, and I learned to read. I would write the charts for the different bands I played in at school and on the road for those bands. I remember we would go into some new town and I would make some calls, pick up some local guys, have one rehearsal and do a show that night. It was wild. I would have to write charts out right there on the spot to help them learn the songs fast. Sometimes we had horns with us on the show. They had to be able read.

Rick: Didn’t Al Kooper find the Allman Brothers?

Bob Boykin: I don’t know how they originally got discovered. I just remember knowing them when they were all really young in their early 20s out of Daytona Beach, Florida.

Rick: A long time I read ago the question; ”How do you get a guitar player to turn down?” Hand him some sheet music [Both laughing].

Bob Boykin: Not all guitar players.

Rick: That’s true, especially session guys. Were you ever in Nashville?

Bob Boykin: I lived in Nashville for 10 years, before moving to LA.

Rick: Who did you work with?

Bob Boykin: I moved to Nashville in 1976. As soon as I got to town, I started playing the local clubs. It wasn’t long before I got offered a job playing at an entertainment park there called Opryland, because they needed players that could read for the live shows they did. I auditioned and got the job. I was playing off-Broadway shows that would come through there to play at the Grand Ole Opry House during the week. It was a full orchestra. I’ve worked for shows like Chorus Line, Annie, Showboat and even Liza Minnelli came there, she ended up asking me to go out on the road to do some shows with her.

Rick: In the studio, did you need to be able to improvise or were you working with sheet music all the time.

Bob Boykin: Both. Always, I would play the chart then improvise. I know some studio players are more legit, but my background was from the clubs, and the road. That’s where you learn how to improvise.

Rick: When did you start to develop scores for the TV and film industry?

Bob Boykin: That happened when I moved to L.A., and that was a big reason why I left Nashville in 1986. I was working and things were going good, but I’ve always loved anything with horns, being a trombone player early on myself, and was really into the music I’d heard coming out of L.A. at that time. I had started my fusion band called Firepower playing the local clubs there. I was listening to Tom Scott and the L.A. Express and guitar players like Larry Carlton, Robben Ford and Lee Ritenour out of L.A. They had horns on their records, and I was really into that.

It’s kind of a freak thing of nature or maybe just fate, I guess, that I wrote a song about Nashville that ended up being a commercial there about how superstars from London came to the Nashville baby airport to play at the Grand Ole Opry, some of the lyrics in the song. There was always a lot of R&B and music other than country being recorded in Nashville, even back to the ’50s, but most people still think of Nashville as just a country music town. But there is really a lot more going on there.

I was writing then, with a girl named Pam Tillis, who later became a big country star and had a lot of hits. At that time she was not signed. We were just young songwriters hanging around Music Row, barely 19 or so. We wrote this song called “The Other Side of Nashville”, which the president of Warner Bros. at the time, Jimmy Bowen, heard and said he wanted to make a commercial and put it on TV. We cut the basic track in Nashville and actually came out to L.A. to record the horns, and I ended up with the Sea Wind horns, who also were the Earth, Wind & Fire horn section and Lee Ritenour’s horn guys. They played on almost everything else coming out of L.A.

It was a dream session for me, to work with guys this good. The section leader, Jerry Hey recommended Ernie Watts to play sax, who just got off the road with the Stones, who I later became good friends with and recorded with when I moved to L.A. Together we co-wrote a Billboard top 10 Jazz hit in 1987. When “The Other Side of Nashville” was mixed, it turned out to be a really great track and became very popular in Nashville. We performed it live many times at various events around town. So during all this, somehow the people from a TV show called Star Search in Los Angeles heard it.

It was one of the first types of formats like American Idol is now, but back in the early ’80s it was Star Search with Ed McMahon hosting. They heard that song somehow. They called me up and wanted us to come perform it in the Band category on the show and nobody in the studio band who played on the tracks wanted to do it. All the LA guys that played were Grammy winning musicians who didn’t really want to do Star Search. Why would they? After many months of us saying “No”, they showed up at a session I was on at 10 a.m. in the morning. It was a jingle session at a studio on Music Row. There was a Star Search guy standing there in the booth, I had no idea they were even going to be coming there. He said, “Look, you’ve really got to come do this. We want you to come perform your song “The Other Side of Nashville” on the show. Since I didn’t have a band, I just turned to the guys I was playing with on the session and said, “Hey, you want to go to L.A.?” and they said, “Sure let’s go.” And that’s how it happened. So, we went and did Star Search. We ended up tying on the show with Sawyer Brown, who eventually won the whole thing in that category, that year.

Rick: That’s amazing.

Bob Boykin: Sawyer Brown, I don’t know if you remember them; big country artists now. They’ve had a very successful career since then, but it started with them winning the band category on Star Search. We tied with them in that category and I got disqualified later. Because, they looked at it like I was competing against myself.

What happened was, there’s a clause in your contract that says you cannot compete against yourself on any other tracks, like if you play on tracks in one band, you can’t play on tracks from another band. And since I had already been doing studio work in Nashville, I knew those guys from Sawyer Brown. I had already played on some of the tracks that they used months before ever having heard of Star Search. On the show you use tracks you didn’t play live. Only the vocals are live, so they had taped music with live vocals, and I was playing on some of the other band’s tracks as well. They looked at it like I was competing against myself and I got disqualified, and that was never talked about on TV. I just kind of disappeared.

Rick: Oh, depressing.

Bob Boykin: Not really, it’s just as well. I mean, it really wasn’t my goal to be a country band out of Star Search, but it helped to launch their career and it started their whole thing going. It was very successful for them and it all worked out good.

Rick: When you’re working on a score for a film or that type of thing, do you typically see the film ahead of time and you work with what’s going on in the film, or do you just write something and they say, “We want these tracks,” and then they fit it in and edit it for you?

Bob Boykin: The way it works is if I’m coming in as a guitarist on a movie or TV show, I don’t see anything until I show up the first time. Then right there on the spot, that’s when they give me the music. Usually there’s a composer and a producer there as well. Sometimes the composer is the producer. They give me the music and I see the movie for the first time. He kind of gives me an idea of what he’s thinking about as far as sound and their general approach, and I just record it.

Rick: Do they look for things like feeling? “We want this feeling out of this music.”

Bob Boykin: Yeah. A lot of times there’s that scenario, but some times you show up and they want you to see the movie scene and then you just improvise to it and come up with something. They’ll say, “We want something in a blues vein here,” or “I want something in a rock vein.”

Eddie Van Halen and I both played together on a film called 101 Dalmatians for Disney many years ago, back in the ’80s. There was a scene where they just wanted some rock guitar, two guitars jamming. There was no written music. They said just “Play”. Sometimes it’s like that. But 90 percent of the time it’s written music.

Rick: What was it like playing with Eddie?

Bob Boykin: Oh, he’s a great guy. We had met before at Bob Bradshaw’s shop in Los Angeles, you might have heard of him. He makes studio racks and sort of keeps all our gear working. He’d worked on Eddie’s rigs since Eddie started out. Bob did all the studio guitar players, Michael Landau, Dann Huff, Paul Jackson, etc. All the guys used him. I had seen Eddie in the shop through those channels before that session.

Rick: What kind of guitar do you find that you tend to grab? I’ve got several guitars, but I’m always kind of going toward the ’66 Tele, picking that up.

Bob Boykin: Yeah, you can’t go wrong with that. Now I’m playing mostly John Suhr guitars.

Rick: Oh, are you? Okay.

Bob Boykin: John and I met in a similar situation, when he first moved to L.A. from New York in the ’80s and before his days at the Fender Custom Shop. He was working out of Bob Bradshaw’s shop in North Hollywood. John helped to design the Custom Audio Electronics amps and pre-amps that were being sold at that shop.

One day, he was working on my guitar before a session and says “Hey, I’m thinking about coming out with my own line of guitars. Let me know if you’re interested,” and I said, “Yes. Why don’t you make one for me?” He actually made me a neck that was just a piece of solid maple wood, like a 2×4 or something when i first saw it. Then the next time i saw it, it was a perfect neck with a rosewood fingerboard for my guitar. It is still my favorite neck I have ever had. I already had some old Seymour Duncan pickups I liked. We put series, split, parallel switches in it for each pickup and a push push pot for the tone. That way I can have all three pickups on at the same time if I wanted. It also has an original ’80s Floyd Rose tremolo on it. It’s a great guitar and a very versatile studio guitar, I can get almost every sound out of it on a date. The JB in the bridge position is my favorite rock sound. This was years before he started making his own line of guitars that he sells now. His guitars have evolved a lot since then, even better now.

Rick: Oh, really?

Bob Boykin: Yes, I still have it. It’s my favorite guitar.

Rick: That’s your go-to guitar?

Bob Boykin: I’ve got three of his guitars in there. They’re excellent guitars. I’m mostly a Strat guy. I’ve got a lot of guitars, you know a couple of Les Paul’s and some Tele’s, Acoustics. Mostly I like Strats.

Rick: When do you think your next CD will come out?

Bob Boykin: It should be out by the end of this year. We already have a label that wants to put it out in Japan, like yesterday. Because of the earthquake that just happened over there, they obviously have some other priorities to deal with now. So they kind of said, “Okay. Go ahead and take more time if you need it,” because they need time to regroup with all that. I’m still working all the time on movies and TV shows, whereas when I’m working on my records, I have to make time to do that. It’s kind of in between the gaps.

Rick: For a young guitarist who wants to get into session work and the type of work you’re doing, is it better to be in L.A., Nashville or New York, or does it matter that much?

Bob Boykin: It depends on his style, what he’s into and what he thinks he’s best at. Studio work has fallen off a lot in the last few years, not like it was in the ‘80s and ‘90s, there were a lot of dates. People are recording at home more. I think right now, Nashville has more going on, because they’re still playing with live rhythm sections, you know go into a studio and play, more there.

Rick: What about live gigs? Are you finding live gigs are harder to get these days?

Bob Boykin: I think the way the economy is, people aren’t going out as much. It seems like there’s more live gigs where you travel out of the US than there is in the country right now.

Rick: I think Ray Sawyer (Dr. Hook) told me the same thing.

Bob Boykin: Yeah, he works out of the country mostly. My other buddies, they’re touring all the time in Europe and Asia way more than here, especially the instrumentalists that I know.

Rick: I think Brazil’s starting to become a big market as well, especially for jazz.

Bob Boykin: Brazil, yeah. For sure.

Rick: What kind of business skills do you find you’ve developed over the years that maybe you didn’t have when you first started, like understanding contracts and knowing what not to do?

Bob Boykin: What I learned is that you definitely have to have some knowledge of that. Especially as a composer, you always have a contract or sync license when you’re working on a film or TV show. I had a prime-time show on ABC television in 1990 and ’91 where I was the composer and I was in charge of all the music, to record and produce. That’s when I realized that you’ve got to have a good music attorney or agent that you’re working with to review all contracts. Because your working for a major like Sony or Columbia, dealing with their attorneys, always get everything in writing.

So many times what it really comes down to is what you already know… like what your job is that you have to do and how to do it, but there’s still all this other wording in there that they add in to make you kind of scratch your head and go, “Well, I thought we were doing this, but now we are doing something else. What does this mean?” I would recommend that anybody breaking into composing find a good music attorney to review all contracts. I’ve seen many contracts over the years and I still come across something in every one of them that I don’t understand. So I’ll end up sending it to my attorney to review, and he will negotiate with them to change it.

Rick: You don’t want to lose your rights to your music.

Bob Boykin: Yeah, and that’s the first thing they go for, your publishing. I will say that starting out, and this is with every writer I know, I had to give up more, in the beginning. Where I’m at now, I don’t give up as much of my rights as far as publishing royalties; now I own my own publishing company.

Normally, you would never give up your writer’s share to anybody, you keep that. When you start out, they’re asking for publishing and that’s OK if you are being compensated. The bigger the job is – when I write for Sony, Paramount or Columbia Pictures – you kind of know going in they’re gonna ask for that. So you or your attorney should ask for more money, because you’re give up publishing, and get your composer fee worked out. Usually it’s half up front and half when you deliver.

Rick: Other than the CD you’re working on, what projects do you have going at the moment?

Bob Boykin: Right now I’m excited about a blues Christmas CD that I’m doing with some of my buddies here in L.A. and also a couple of guys in Nashville are working on it. It’s unlike any other Christmas CD I’ve heard… there have been songs released by just about every blues artist, but there’s never been one that I could find that is a complete CD of 10 or so songs where every song on the CD is blues. Like if it’s B.B. King style blues or Stevie Ray Vaughan Texas-style blues, which is more like what we’re doing, sort of a cross between Eric Clapton and Stevie Ray with some blues harmonica. Right now there are no horns on it. It’s mostly a guitar driven rhythm section and a singer that’s more rock blues. She’s also helping out with the new arrangements, not the traditional way you have always heard these songs. It’s taking some time because we have to work around everybody’s schedule. She’s in the studio making a movie about Janis Joplin right now starring Renee Zellweger as Janis.

Rick: I’ve heard about that.

Bob Boykin: There’s been some talk about it. It’s been over 10 years in the making, but it’s finally starting to move. Christina Vierra is the vocalist on the soundtrack singing all the Janis songs in the studio. Renee plays Janis but doesn’t do much singing.

Rick: Christina’s got a voice like Janis?

Bob Boykin: Oh yeah. They had auditioned hundreds of singers over the years. But kept coming back to Christina, now they have finally settled on her to be the vocalist for the movie, mostly because the producer who knew Janis and worked with her in the 60s, liked Christina’s voice the best. He had been coming out to listen to her at gigs over the years and became a fan. Her name is Christina Vierra, and her website is www.christinavierra.com. Check it out, there are sound clips posted there on the website.

Rick: You mentioned Stevie Ray Vaughan. What did you think of him when you first heard him?

Bob Boykin: I was a fan the first time I heard him. I never met him, but I liked his approach to the blues as being more rock and a great feel and tone. I also liked Albert King and Hendrix. One of the first songs I ever learned was “Purple Haze.” I would get together with friends after church and jam. But not Hendrix, I had to sneak away from church to play that, they didn’t dig him too much. Stevie Ray came later on.

Rick: You were sneaky [Laughs].

Bob Boykin: Yeah. Sneaking off on a tractor when I was supposed to be plowing in the field. I would go down to the little pond house, get my record player out, put on Johnny Winter, Rick Derringer, Hendrix or somebody and sit there with my guitar. When I was done playing, I’d have to go back to work and I’d put my guitar back in the feedbag, tie it up and hide it again. That’s what I did until I got good enough to start doing gigs when I was about 15.

Rick: All you’d have to do is tell your grandparents you were playing with your “axe.”

Bob Boykin: Yeah, exactly [Both laughing]. They happened to notice that I liked to take the tractor, go in the fields and plow a lot! As soon as I knew I could get out of sight, I would disappear and sneak away to practice. It was far enough away that nobody could hear me. But eventually, I did get caught. I heard it said many times by my grandfather: “Bobby! Put that damn guitar down and get back to work!”

Rick: You had that passion early.

Bob Boykin: Yeah.

Rick: When you pick up your guitar these days, do you still have the passion that you had when you were a kid?

Bob Boykin: Oh, yeah. I’m one of those guys; I like to practice. I practice quite a bit. Every time I pick up my guitar, it seems like within 10 minutes of starting practicing, all of a sudden I’ve got a song that comes out of it. Somehow, It seems like every good thing that has happened in my career as a composer, outside of just playing guitar on somebody else’s project, which I still enjoy, was because of a song I wrote that got me the job. It’s always the song.

With my TV show on ABC, they had just about every writer from Columbia Pictures/Sony writing. It wasn’t that they were looking for a guitar kind of song. It was to be sort of a pop R&B style with lyrics. They wanted Patti LaBelle to sing it. Finally, out of tons of songs submitted they picked my song as the one, not knowing that I was qualified or experienced enough to be a composer and deliver the music for a weekly series on time every week, which is very demanding.

They knew nothing about me, other than I was a guitar player and the guy who wrote the song they liked. So a few days later, I was on a session with a guy who used to work with and produced a lot of stuff with Albert Lee and Emmylou Harris and the Hot Band. His name is Brian Ahern, a legendary producer. He had a studio here in L.A. called Amigo, and I was over there one night working. This lady who just happened to be there said her husband was the president of the music department of Sony Pictures television. She says, “Hey, you should come by and talk to my husband tomorrow. He has some new shows coming up this season.” That’s kind of how that gig happened.

So, I go to the meeting and played my song and he said, “I think this is exactly what we are looking for for a TV show on ABC.” So it ends up that they took the song, but I also wanted to be the composer on the show as well. I had not ever had a weekly show on prime time television before. It was only because that guy from Sony who believed in me stood up in the meeting one day and said, “Hey, I think Bob can handle being the weekly composer. You should consider hiring him, not only for the song but to contract and produce the musicians at the session.” Well, it was a union job with all union musicians on contract every week. I ended up getting the job.

I did one session—I’ll never forget this—it was the first session, all live, no overdubs, with a full horn section, same guys that played on my Nashville song I spoke about earlier, background singers and rhythm section, and we recorded the theme I wrote. After that one session, when all the Columbia Pictures brass were there, the producers of the show and all this said it turned out great and they were very happy with it. It lasted only about one and half hours. Well, after that session and more than two years of working on the show, I never saw them again, except for only at spotting sessions and parties. They never asked me to rewrite anything over after 26 episodes, wall-to-wall music, including commercials. They liked everything I wrote and it just worked out. I was very lucky.

Rick: What was the name of that song or the show?

Bob Boykin: The show was called Married People on ABC. Crazy About You was the name of the song, the main title. They had hired Patti LaBelle to come from Europe to sing it that day, but, her plane got delayed and she didn’t make it. It’s kind of a funny story, the girl who was the singer on the demo track got a lucky break; she sounded exactly like Patti LaBelle. I said, “Well, if you like her so much that you picked my song, why don’t you just have her sing it on the session?” They called her in. She came in and sang it on the session that day and was awesome, blew everyone away. For two years it ran on prime-time network television and still in re-runs. You can hear it on YouTube, just type in my name. I was happy for her because I liked her performance so much. I was proud. It just kind of worked out for everybody that day.

Rick: Any other projects going on?

Bob Boykin: There always stuff going on. I just finished producing a new CD for Ray Sawyer, the former lead singer who wears the eye patch and hat from the band Dr. Hook. You might remember them from the ‘70s and early ‘80s. They had a lot of hits on the radio. His new CD is called Captain and it is out now. It is his first solo record in over 25 years, all new songs. You can get it at www.raysawyer.com.

Also, as I mentioned I am recording a blues Christmas CD with Christina on vocals. We’re trying to finish it up over the summer in order to have it released and ready for this Christmas. At the moment I’m working mostly on that and trying to find time to do some demos of new songs, and finish recording the tracks on my new guitar CD, Twister, due out later this year. Stay in touch on my website www.bobboykin.com, there will be some pre-release sound clips there. Peace.