(Pictured above: Performing with my brother, singer/songwriter Jerry Davenport at the 40-year anniversary for Mike “Mad Dog” Adams at the Crows Nest.)
I have heard that we learn as we age. That being the case, I must have learned a lot for I have been around this tiny and tired old world and back several times. My travels as a USAF pilot and C-130 squadron commander took me to many strange and dangerous places. The most difficult mission I encountered as a commander was leading a United Nations coalition of 25 airplanes and 750+ people into the Somali refugee camps for several months in 1992-93. We did our best to take food to the thousands of Africans starving and dying from disease in those hell holes.
I have flown Air Force C-130 missions into Russian, Lithuania, Latvia, Belarus, Ukraine, Germany, Poland, Israel, Greece, Saudi Arabia, Spain, England, Korea, Japan, Philippines, and on and on until it sounds like I am reciting places on a globe. As a tourist, my wife, Dr. Diana, and I have visited China, Peru, Italy, Hungary, and the Amazon regions of Brazil. We have also served with three medical missions into the mountains of Guatemala to take much-needed medical care to the Indigenous Mayan Indian villages.
I have roasted marshmallows on Mount Picaya (an active volcano) in Guatemala, climbed the Mayan ruins of Tikal near Belize, crawled through the burial chambers beneath the Great Pyramid in Egypt, marveled at the precision of the ruins of Machu Pichu, danced on the Great Wall of China, sailed a Hobe Cat sailboat on the Red Sea during the First Gulf War (don’t ask), earned my PhD, served as a jet medevac pilot supporting the Cleveland Clinic’s organ transplant program, and played my music and sang my songs at most of these locations (yes, some people think I am nuts).
I have been playing the guitar since my days in an apartment at The Ohio State University in 1969. One of my roommates at the time had a Martin guitar that his father, a heart surgeon, had given him for his birthday. Fortunately for me, this poor soul was tone deaf which offered me unfettered access to his guitar for several years until I graduated. I remember how angry my father became when he found out that I had wasted $125 on an Epiphone guitar in 1972 just after I got married for the first time.
I took that guitar with me to pilot training, on to Mississippi a year later as a new jet instructor pilot, to Arkansas where I became a C-130 flight instructor, to McChord AFB, Washington, where I was recognized two years later as a warm body and shipped off to Korea for a one-year remote tour that cost me my wife, daughter, home, car, guitars, and everything else that I owned.
Later in St. Louis, I remarried, had two wonderful children, retired, moved to Ohio, got divorced again ten years later, remarried, and built a life on Catawba Island near Cedar Point Amusement Park (look it up). Three years ago I purchased a 104 year-old stone church from the Methodists and renovated the building as HALO Concerts (halolive.us) wherein also resides The Mohawk (recording) Studio, of which I am part owner. Although I lease the building to my partner in the enterprise, I record there several times a month. Whew! I better stop there or this will become a book.
Needless to say, I have done a lot in my short 70 years, but nothing gives me as much pleasure as performing on stage in front of a great audience. Beyond that, seeing the reaction to my original songs provides me with my greatest satisfaction. Of the 195 songs that I have now written (never mind the number because it changes weekly), about 110 of them are worthy of public consumption (in my estimation). Somewhere on or near this web site you can listen to a few of these songs should you so choose. For more of what goes on inside my head, please take a detour over to my blog page. Thanks for reading this and for supporting and giving a crap about local musicians and their contributions to the music industry.