From his obituary: A professional singer-guitarist, with a loyal and loving following from Greenwich Village to Arizona, Kenny will be remembered for the warm and generous heart he shared through his music.

This is a website I made to honor the memory of my father, whom I missed for most of my childhood, but miss even more now, knowing that he left a hole in my heart, and also for 100's of people who loved him for his generosity, his heart, and his remarkable, awe-inspiring talent as a singer and guitarist.

My Dad and I had a rocky relationship. Mostly that was because fatherhood was never his biggest priority. He was a musician first, and he had a serious problem with drugs and alcohol for most of my life, which put his children (and spouses) much lower on his list. It doesn't make for a great father child relationship, but I'm not a child anymore. I try to work with what I have now. I have a lot of good memories of Dad. Aside from singing and playing (which he did I guess every day) he also loved to read. He would get absorbed in a book and it would seem like he had left the room. He loved science fiction books, as I recall, but lots of others. He could run really fast, which was surprising considering that he never really "exercised" and he certainly didn't take care of himself. He loved jokes, telling stories, and hanging out with friends. Some of his favorite foods were: fried eggplant, fried calamari rings, saltines with sardines and hot sauce on them, ketchup (on nearly everything). He also loved to listen to all kinds of music, but he mostly sang a lot of 60's and 70's rock songs. He never became a commercial success, but everyone who heard him knew he had great talent. I have been collecting all the recordings I can find of him so that they won't be lost.

He had lots of friends wherever he went, and most of them were good, true friends. I miss him, of course, and I really feel sad that my children will never meet him, but at least they can hear him sing. Please contact me if you have photos or recordings of Dad to share with me, or if you would like recordings of him. We also now have a group on Facebook: Late Great Kenny Gwyn Fans, and welcome you to share memories there. - Sasha Mitchell

Board of Directors - Ken Gwyn, Linda Pierro, Kate Comeau, Andy Rogenstein & Vinnie Hancock
Venues:The Village Gate, Inner Circle, NYC

"a shot away" by Steve Kenety
The Dickinsonian
Carlisle, PA

This is from a photo Memory Book. Dad in a nutshell: 1957

Grade: Kindergarten
Hobby: Cowboys
Movie Actor: Rin Tin Tin
TV Show: Roy Rogers
Song: Back in the Saddle

Dad, Mom & Me

Excerpt from: "a shot away" by Steve Kenety
The Dickinsonian, Carlisle, PA
February 11, 1972

The old school was certainly treated to some fine rock and roll last week in the person of Black Forest Rhodes... We think that there should be more functions like this - but then, how much rock and roll is there in Carlisle, anyway? Before now, mark that at almost zero - now, give it a chance.

Their music was certainly tight and well arranged, and their original material was some of the best we've heard in a long time. In addition to that, their renditions of other people's songs was, well, quite fine.

We especially enjoyed a somewhat bizarre version of the old Spencer Davis tune, "Gimme Some Lovin", which put you on your feet and dancing, if you weren't there already, like you should have been...

Add to this the use of two fine guitarists, and you've got yourselves quite a band. Guitarist Kenny Gwyn's voice was certainly something - he alternately sounded like Roger (ne Jim) McGuinn, Joe Cocker, and Jim Messina.

We found them all to be an engaging, friendly bunch of guys, free of all the hang-ups that one often finds in rock bands. They especially played down their house, which could have become a big ego trip...

We should be glad to have them around. Thanks go to WDCV for making it happen.
If you think playing rock and roll is easy all the time, think again. As soon as they finished playing Thursday, they packed everything up, put it in a trailer - and drove straight to Mt. Snow, Vermont, where they had to play the next night. Quite a trip. 12 hours away, with the snow pouring down...

From a note paid to Dad in his guitar case:

To the Under the Arch Singers,

As I am currenly in financial straights myself, I have no spare change to reward you for your wonderful songs. However, some day I will be repulsively wealthy, and then I will fill the guitar case with Gold Krugerant as there is nothing better to do with money than repay you folks for the times you have cheered me up. New York city is a bitch when you're alone and your music reminds me that there are nice things still around. Thanks Much.

Love,

Chuck - a devoted fan

(The Arch is in Washington Square Park, where Dad played with Linda, Kate and other friends. Dad saved this note in his address book)

"Introducing the one and only Kenny Gwyn: Everyone knows he'll be star, 'cause he can play that there guitar, on Jane St."
by Joe Glickman & Lydia Saiger
The Daily News New York, NY
December 27, 1985

Prince, George Thorogood, Steve Forbert and Marianne Faithful drop in to hear him play. Paul Butterfield, Rick Danko and Jaco Pastorius come to jam. What draws these stars to the Inner Circle, an obscure club located at 113 Jane St. in the Village?

Kenny Gwyn, resident guitarist extraordinaire, rips out hits of the '60s and early '70s with a virtuosity that has earned him a cult following. Regulars claim to have seen him every weekend - some say every night - for the last three years.

At age 21, Gwyn played lead guitar for Chubby Checker. Later with his band Black Forest Rhodes, he shared the stage with Richie Havens, Ike and Tina Turner, John Hammond, Edgar Winter and The James Gang. Now at 34, Gwyn labors six nights a week on the outskirts of the Village - a talent so compelling one wonders how success has eluded him. "The only success I have," Gwyn says, "is the mastery of my craft."

Kenny Gwyn spent most of his childhood feeling isolated. The youngest of three(sic) children, he grew up in Kearny, NJ, one of the handful of blacks in a working-class Irish/Italian town. "I was made to feel inferior," Gwyn says. "I was called 'Nigger,' spat at and was always getting in fights." When his sisters went out on dates, Kenny sat alone in the car singing along with the radio. At home if the radio wasn't wailing, the sounds of Ray Charles, gospel and Johnny Mathis were. When his Mom finally handed him a guitar for Christmas, he was 14 and "horny to play."

The guitar became a means of expression as well as a vehicle of escape. "Music was an obsession that I couldn't get enough of, " he says in an animated voice. "My mother would send me out to the yard to sweep leaves and I'd be out there playing the broom. I played eight hours a day." By age 16 he was drawing crowds with his singing and acoustic guitar in Washington Square Park.

Twenty years later, Gwyn and his band The Board of Directors, fill the Inner Circle with the sounds of Clapton, The Grateful Dead and Hendrix. Hunched over the neck of his Ovation, the ashes of a cigarette in his right hand growing and falling, Gwyn calls on his repertoire of some 700 songs. His curly black hair flops in front of tinted glasses; the veins in his neck pop out as if he were tearing notes from his chest. "Besides being an incredible technical guitarist, " raves one of the regulars, "Kenny puts out so much."

On weekends, crowds of 200-plus jam the Inner Circle. Photos and paintings by students from the School of Visual Arts line the walls. Between a red-eyed poster of Albert Einstein and the seductive gaze of Clark Gable across the room, scores of students in patched jeans and tie-dyed shirts dance as long as Gwyn plays. Here is the best of the '60s they were too young to remember, and for those who are starting to gray around the temples, it's a chance to recapture musical memories.

Outside the lights of Hoboken and Union City stare across the Hudson River. Around the corner at the Jane St. Hotel, Gwyn and his girlfriend Linda Pierro, (she tends bar and sometimes sings with the band) share an 8 x 20 room with their kitten Georgia. Were it not for the five guitars leaning in the corner, this would be another anonymous room with no phone, bathroom or kitchen: A stopping place for people in transit. "I don't find it depressing, "assures Gwyn, "People here have personality."

Gwyn is a street musician at heart; a man who has spent many nights under the arch in Washington Square Park. "I just want to be known as a musician. To some extent I'm successful, although not in my own right since I'm playing other people's music. I'd love to be discovered and fulfill some of my dreams, make Linda's life a little easier; give my two daughters some of the finer things in life; repay my parents. But I'm not an aggressive person. I'm just a player. I don't know how to go about promoting my self. Though in my own slow way I'm making an effort."

After a month in the hospital - the longest he's been away from the guitar in 20 years - Gwyn beat a long-standing addiction to drugs and alcohol. Now that he's back dazzling inner Circle patrons, Gwyn is constantly asked why he doesn't play original music.

"Maybe some of it's fear," says Paul Butterfield. "His originals are melodic, beautiful songs." Says Gwyn, "It's not that I'm afraid of success," he says without hesitation, I'm just not at that stage with this band to be comfortable enough to play my own music." Butterfield agrees: "Kenny needs to play with a higher caliber of musician."

In the meantime, Gwyn recognizes the conflict. "There won't be any success until I start playing original music," he says. "That's partly my fault - something I'm conscious of. We've worked on originals, but the band as a unit .... I don't feel all that comfortable... they're just not approaching the material right."

Kenny Gwyn is a study in contradictions: An accomplished musician showered by applause while laboring in obscurity, a guitarist who jams with stars like Danko, Butterfield, Pastorius and Jimmy Page, while leading a band he must carry, a versatile musician who, to date, has not played his originals in public.

I plan to use him on my next album," Butterfield says. "Jaco (Pastorius), Kenny and I are working on some songs and we're thinking about touring. This is a turning point for Kenny. He has a shot to do something."

"Talking with a Master Musician (The Hendrix of Downtown)" by Stephen Witt
The Street Singer's Beat, Village Voice, New York, NY
October 10, 1990

Last Saturday, while purchasing some strings at Matt Umanov guitars, I ran into Kenny Gwyn, who was also purchasing strings. It was good seeing Kenny, who had been away from New York the last few years playing in Tucson, Arizona, and touring with The Comets of Bill Haley and The Comets fame. I had learned Kenny was back in town a few weeks earlier from the buzz among musicians in Washington Square Park and on Bleecker Street.

Musically speaking, Gwyn, a singer/guitarist/interpreter of songs, is about the closest thing in the village to Jimi Hendrix. His understanding and use of total music theory, including complicated chord structures, rhythms, and lead playing are watched and studied by many local musicians. He is also one of the most pitch perfect and soulful singers around. Among his followers are such notables as Buzzy Felton, Jimmy Page, Jorma Kaukonen, and Rick Danko, who from time to time seek out Kenny for gigs or to jam. While Gwyn was playing at the now defunct Mills Tavern, the previously mentioned musicians, as well as the late Paul Butterfield and Jaco Pastorius, would often come by to listen or sit in.
Like Hendrix, Kenny has had a rough go of it in New York. Although, he is able to eke out a living by playing beneath the arch in Washington Square Park and in the clubs that line Bleecker Street, his talent deserves a better income. He is a tall, light skinned black man, with wild hair, thick glasses and a large flat forehead.

"I got kicked out from playing underneath the arch yesterday. The police said my voice is too loud even though I was playing without an amp," Kenny told me, as we walked west on Bleecker Street from Matt Umanov's. "It always smacks of surrealism to me that given the volume of trucks, cab horns and sirens, which are omnipresent in the city day and night, that they would chose to persecute singers and musicians."

"Did they stop you before or after the big marijuana sting operation," I asked, referring to the two-day police operation to bust nickel and dime marijuana dealers and buyers in Washington Square Park. "They stopped me right after the operation." "That was one stupid drug bust operation," I said. "Yeah. Especially seeing that most of the reefer in Washington Square Park is bogus anyway, and in light of the violent crime situation in the streets, it seems like a tragic waste of police manpower."

We arrived at Kenny's Castaways, where Kenny had stashed his guitar. There over a beer, we continued our conversation.
"I'm from Kearny, NJ," Kenny told me. "My mother bought me my first guitar when I was 14. I was basically until that time a singer. I just wanted to learn how to accompany my voice, but then lead guitar became popular. There was a fellow on a tv show called Shindig. His name was James Burton and he already achieved nororiety as a session man on a lot of Ricky Nelson albums and later with Elvis Presley. Watching him play guitar like that made me want to learn, also. Subsequently, I've been influenced by Clapton, BB King, Freddy King, Albert King and Django Rheinhart. I don't see myself as a composer of songs. I'm more of a song stylist. I like songs like 'Everybody's talkin" by Fred Neil, 'Colorado' by Rick Roberts, or 'Georgia on my Mind' by Hoagy Carmichael."

"How do you see music as an artistic and spiritual force?"

"Music is an extension of the oral folk tradition. It has the ability to transport individuals and groups out of otherwise mundane experience to places, climes and encounters as varied as the wealth of music available at the present time. As a musician, I get as caught up as the audience in any given song."

"How was it in Tucson, Ariz.," I asked.

"It was great. I played the clubs and the parties around the University of Arizona. I also played the streets behind the Pima County courthouse, and also on the mall at the campus. My band also played the 4th Avenue street fair. It is an annual street fair that features some great Indian arts and crafts. The only problem with the music scene there is that it's seasonal. You can only find work when school is in session."

"Do you ever think about getting a record contract?"

"I would like to get a record contract. I'd like to make a million dollars just to take care of my kids, and my mom and dad."

After we finished our beers, we walked outside with our guitars and Kenny showed me how to play "Danny Boy." I had asked Kenny if he could show me the song for my gig later at the Sine-e Cafe. I had remembered Kenny moving me very deeply with this song a few years back. Anyway, he played the song with a very complex arrangement featuring major chords, minor chords, major 7ths, and miner 9ths. However, all the chords seemed to fit into the melody in a very logical order. Indeed, playing with or learning music from Kenny Gwyn is a humbling experience.