Garrison Doles is a broken shard of sea glass that washed up on the beach of his hometown of Miami, Florida. Shattered and jagged and tossed into the ocean to tumble against the sandpaper bottom until it rolled out smooth and hard and not quite transparent.
It took a lot of hard work and determination to develop a world class drinking problem. Afternoons hustling nine-ball at pool tables in the corners of 7th Avenue strip joints. Nights picking out home-made songs on his battered Martin D-28 in saloons from Key West to St. Augustine. “I wasn’t gettin’ a lot of vegetables back then. Unless you count Marlboros and Jack Daniels”.
Coconut Grove wasn’t a bad place to start out. Coffee houses where Joni met David Crosby and began her long run. Where Jimmy Buffet and Steve Goodman worked the kinks out and legends like Michael Smith and Gamble Rogers traded forty minute sets in rooms with audiences of fifty or sixty or maybe a hundred on a big Saturday night.. “I’d see Fred Neil and Vince Martin on a tiny stage in a tight spotlight and think that was just where I wanted to spend my whole life. I didn’t know anything. I thought there were places like that all over the world. I barely got to play any of those joints at all and then they were gone and I found myself working dark, smoky bars; playing for people who showed up to drink and get lucky and to definitely not listen to original, acoustic soul songs. I did that for about fifteen years before I figured out it wasn’t what I’d signed up for and that it was killing me. So I quit.”
He quit playing in bars, quit drinking, quit smoking. Moved to Orlando and got a real job. Got married, had a kid and got divorced. Got himself involved in some local drama - he was co-founder of Theatre Downtown, a way-off-off-Broadway style theatre that’s been around for about twenty years now, where he has produced, acted, directed, designed and written for the theatrical stage. He can’t seem to stay out of trouble.
And he just keeps on writing songs and somehow the audiences find him. Raising his fifteen year old son has kept him pretty close to home but he performs at all of Florida’s folk and acoustic music festivals, of which there are 5 or 6 really good ones, and at house concerts and other listening venues. Now it’s time to get out on the road and share his stuff with a larger listening community.
A finalist twice in the South Florida Folk Festival song contest and winner of the contests at Suwannee Springfest and at The Gamble Rogers Folk Festival, he’s got three independent CD’s out there; This Man’s Heart (live original folk), The Night of Heaven and Earth (original Christmas songs) and Draw Us Closer (original contemplative worship songs).
He is currently in production on two new records and plans to release them simultaneously in the fall of 2008.
Garrison Doles is a true singer/songwriter. He is a songmaker and a storymaker and listening to these songs is like running the pad of your thumb around the edge of that smooth, green sea glass. You can sense the raggedness beneath the surface. You can feel the textures of life’s abrasion, the swirling imprints of the forces that polish us down to our essential selves and there is a comfort in that and a complex sort of pleasure. |
A $100 cash prize