Biographies

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Doug was born & raised in the Davis Mountains of Texas. He took piano & violin lessons there as a child, but never showed a genuine interest until his latter teens.  His musical influence came mainly from his father, who played fiddle & guitar in his own cowboy band.  Doug decided at the age of 17 to pursue a musical career, leaving Fort Davis directly upon high school graduation and heading off to Levelland, Texas to attend South Plains College for study in commercial music.  He played fiddle for the Bent Tree Jamboree Dinner Theater in Ruidoso, NM during the summers of 1993 to 1996, and in the Barleen Family Dinner Theatre in Phoenix, AZ over the winters of 1995 & 1996.  While in Phoenix, he acquired a McNab/Border Collie puppy he named Holly-peño, who eventually became a significant element to his musical act.  Between 1994 & 1999, Doug moved between Phoenix, Ruidoso, Nashville, East Tennessee, Dallas, and Austin several times, playing fiddle with numerous cover bands and picking up odd jobs in between.  In 1999, Doug decided he would rather work for himself and play his own songs, so with the help of friend John Wheeler (of later Hayseed-Dixie fame), he recorded his first two albums, with all-original material, and made a final move to Austin to start up his own band.  He didn't get his band put together, but he got himself in the middle of the emerging Texas Music circuit, opening shows for the likes of Cory Morrow, Pat Green, Roger Creager, and others.  Doug stood out with his musical comedy routine accompanied by just a guitar and a fiddle-playing dog.  In 2000, they co-hosted the Willie Nelson picnic and recorded a Live album in front of a sold out College Station crowd.  Doug recorded another Live album in 2002 (his fourth).  In 2003, the duo appeared on national television as guests of The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, Animal Planet's Pet Star, and Ripley's Believe It Or Not.  Doug also hosted a weekly radio program in Austin during the fall of 2003 & 2004.  In 2003, Doug contributed a Live recording to the Waylon Jennings Red River Tribute album.  And in 2004, Doug released his 5th album Everybody Knows My Name (full studio production) under his own BigHat Records label.  He finally got his Big Hat Band put together that year, but felt discontent with the instrumentation.  He also lost Holly-peño his singing & fiddle-playing sidekick in July 2004, so he decided he needed to start over once again in 2005.  Doug reformed his show as an all-acoustic trio (fiddle, guitar, and upright bass), with their debut performance opening for Willie Nelson!  By the end of 2005, the Doug Moreland Show was in full swing as a 5-piece band with the addition of drums and piano.  2006 saw things growing even bigger as his new group recorded & produced their own full-band project titled Doug Moreland. The album released on October 17, 2006.  (photo by Alfred Mathis of The Studio - Tyler, Texas, 2007)

Eric Lenington

Born to a performing arts household, Eric started playing piano at age 6.  His mother was a professional ballerina with New York City Ballet and American Ballet Theatre; while his dad played bass in both LA and New York City, including the Café Wha.  During grade school, Eric took up the trombone and won the state trombone competition two years in a row.  By the time high school came around, he had picked up his dad’s bass and started playing wherever he could.  High school was spent at North Carolina School of the Arts, and college started at Indiana University with a music scholarship.  By age 18 he was making a living as a musician in the Midwest, and by age 21 he was playing in the national rock band Johnny Socko.  After moving to Texas, he met Brady Black of the Randy Rogers Band, who introduced him to Texas Music and its musicians.  Eric played with the Peter Dawson Band before joining up with Doug Moreland in 2004.  (photo by Alfred Mathis of The Studio - Tyler, Texas, 2007)

Andrew Silver

Andrew earned a bachelors degree in Music Education from Northwestern State University and a masters in Music Performance from Texas State University, and has achieved 15 years experience as a percussionist/drummer.  He started his performance career with a tour of the Caribbean in the show band on Carnival Cruise Lines.  He briefly returned home to Louisiana, but eventually moved to Austin to continue a life as a professional musician.  After his move to Austin, he performed with various ensembles such as the Austin Symphony Orchestra, Handmade Melody Trio, and Ray Charles during the 2001 KGSR Blues Festival. Andrew currently works as an innovative teacher and clinician at area schools, and is an active member of the International Association of Jazz Educators and the Percussive Arts Society.  Andrew joined the Doug Moreland Show in 2005.  (photo by Jeremiah Cook)

Dan Johnson

Dan was born into a musical family.  His great-grandmother played piano and sang in private clubs back in the 40’s and 50’s.  Both his great-grandfather and grandfather were fiddlers.  And Dan’s father was a professional musician all of his life, and was a top mandolin player in Houston at the time of his death nine years ago.  Dan credits his dad as his musical inspiration.  He started Dan playing guitar at the age of 12, and encouraged  him do his first national tour at the age of 17 while he was still in high school.  Dan spent two years at Alvin Junior College studying sound production before he turned his sights on the steel guitar.  He has toured with Hank Williams III, John Evans, and Jarrod Birmingham, prior to joining Doug Moreland in 2007.   In the fall of 2007, Dan released his first solo steel guitar album The Curse of the Fender Triple Eight.  Although he was born in Florida, Dan counts Texas as home, having lived here since he was eight years old.  (photo by Alfred Mathis of The Studio - Tyler, Texas, 2007)

The Doug Moreland Show

Noteworthy Appearances

The Doug Moreland Show made its debut appearance in March 2005 as the opening act for Willie Nelson at the Rosa Hart Theater in Lake Charles, Louisiana. Also in 2005, the band performed internationally for the first time in Bocas del Toro, Panama, with a return appearance there in 2006.  They performed at The MusicFest in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, which was broadcast live across the nation on XM Radio, in 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2008.  (Doug made his 8th appearance at this festival.)  In 2006, the band achieved 150 performances, including a few openings for other bands such as Asleep At The Wheel, Two Tons of Steel, Junior Brown, and Billy Joe Shaver.  The band traveled to Europe in August 2007, performing for festivals in Holland, Germany, Belgium, and France.  (Left: photo by Kerry Hock, 2007)

Musical Merit

Doug Moreland received a Will Rogers Cowboy Award for Western Music Male Performer of the Year at the Academy of Western Artists Awards show in August 2007. He also won Entertainer of the Year at the Texas Music Awards in April 2007!

In 2004, XM Radio's Cross-Country station charted Doug Moreland's Everybody Knows My Name album in its top 5 spins for over 9 weeks!  The album peaked at #2 and came in at #40 for the year on this nationally broadcast station.

Doug has written and/or recorded a handful of jingles for businesses, including a radio "country version" for Mr. Gatti's Pizza in Austin.  "I Wanna Drive A Truck" off of Everybody Knows My Name was used in a television ad campaign by a regional Chevrolet dealership.

(photo by Freddy Martinez, 2007)

Biography

by John Wooley - August 2006

Give one good listen to Doug Moreland -- the new breakout disc from the Texas-based singer, songwriter, and fiddler, and you'll hear a dazzling variety of musical styles, from acoustic-flavored ballads to full-tilt western swing, all served up with stunningly original lyrics that reflect Moreland's unique, road-tested outlook on life and love. You may even hear echoes of some of his musical heroes; a fiddle lick that recalls western-swing king Bob Wills, an off-kilter viewpoint worthy of Lyle Lovett, a wry line that could've been lifted bodily out of a Jimmy Buffett song.

Those artists influenced him, but not just with their music. "One of the reasons I don't categorize what I do is that all of my heroes are guys who paved their own way," explains Moreland. "So I kind of draw from them. Everybody asks what kind of music I play, and I don't have an answer."

You could call it Texas Music, but that doesn't quite nail it. You could call it dancehall music, or honky-tonk music, but that doesn't get it either. The 11 tracks that comprise Doug Moreland include swing and two-steppers and a steel-guitar-driven portrait of a barroom loser Not Afraid to Fall, that recalls the golden age of 70s country-rockers like the Flying Burrito Brothers and Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen. (In fact, the guest-star lineup on Doug Moreland features Lost Planet Airman Bill Kirchen, along with Asleep at the Wheel's Jason Roberts, and producer-musician extraordinaire Lloyd Maines, who contributes that haunting steel work.) Then, in the midst of all this, comes a straight-ahead waltz Forever in Your Arms, that wraps you in the gentle ache of honest nostalgia.

Indeed, Doug Moreland can't be pigeonholed. But if you wanted to compare him to an artist, perhaps the best one would be another singer-songwriter who did it his own way, the brilliant Roger Miller, who could craft the heartbreaking country classic Husbands and Wives and then turn around and knock out a raucous novelty number along the lines of Dang Me or Kansas City Star. Like Miller, Moreland has made his name with both comedy and straight material. In fact, before her death in 2004, his trained border collie Holly-peño was a uniquely humorous component of Moreland's shows, appearing with him on a number of nationally televised guest appearances -- including, twice, The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.

"I was real excited the first time I was going to be on Leno, on national TV, and I had four CDs out that were all in stores," he recalls. "I remember getting off the plane, and getting into this great big limo going to the NBC studios. And then, I got a phone call telling me that the distributor who had my records had just filed for bankruptcy." He laughs. "So I lost a lot of money on that deal."

A couple of years later, after a series of high-profile gigs and the release of his fifth album, Moreland dissolved his band and started from scratch, putting together a group of top-notch players that had the talent and commitment to lay down the music he heard in his head. Reorganizing as a three-piece, Moreland and his group, including Matt Skinner on guitar and Eric Lenington on bass -- gigged all over Texas and well beyond, winning friends and fans wherever they played. With the addition of percussionist Andrew Silver and pianist Clay Corn, Moreland had a band he wasn't only proud to tour with, but one he wanted to get in the studio. And that's what he did, working with them, his guest stars, and producer Corn to create Doug Moreland.

"Having the guys play on the record was my favorite thing," he says. "I mean, I'm a fan of a lot of those studio guys, but the problem is that you get a lot of records that sound the same as a lot of other records, because you have the same guys playing on 'em. When someone leaves a show of ours, and they go home and put on this record, I want em to go, Wow -- that sounds just like what I just heard."

Even with Scottish guitarist Craig Smith taking over for Skinner, and Texas keyboardist Wade McNutt replacing Corn (who left to join Pat Green's group), that's what Doug Moreland fans get with Doug Moreland. The CD even includes a shot of Moreland's best comedy with The Beer Song, a hilarious takeoff on Hank Snow's I've Been Everywhere. The cut is a reminder that, like his hero Roger Miller, Moreland knows very well how to evoke all sorts of emotions with his music, including laughter.

"Roger Miller's probably my favorite of all of 'em," he says. "He just did it the way he did it, and people enjoyed it. I don't think he tried to do anything to make people happy. He just did things, and it made people happy."

You could say the same thing about Doug Moreland. You could also say what Cross Canadian Ragweed's Cody Canada observed about him.  "When you hear his music, noted Canada, there is no doubt that his talent has no borders." 

For review copies, interviews, or more information contact:

RPR Media
Brandy Reed
(615) 673-0150