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About
Chris Frank has been making music for over 50 years. His Hawaiian music teacher showed him some chords on the ukulele when he was in kindergarten, and he just kept playing. His professional debut was at the age of fourteen, playing bass in his brother's garage band. They actually had a gig, saving Senior Prom night from disaster by filling in for the "professionals" who never showed up. At fifteen he got a "steady" job with "Gib Krisinger & His Orchestra" playing fireman's balls and country clubs almost every Friday and Saturday Night. It was a six-piece band with an average age of about 40, and he learned "Moonglow" and "The Sheik of Araby" and many of their relatives in his four years with Gib. (They stopped booking gigs around 2001. It was his dad's band before he took over, so the Krisinger band probably worked over a 50 year period.)
From there it was sensitive singer-songwriter (the "college years", where he also picked up a degree in music at the University of Iowa), elementary school teacher, a few years on the road, solo and with a few bands, and finally settling down in Chapel Hill, NC. He eventually wormed his way into The Red Clay Ramblers, and continues with them today. The Ramblers are active in concert, film (scoring and appearing in two of Sam Shepard's works) and stage, thrice thrust upon the Broadway boards, winning a Tony Award in 1999 for "Fool Moon" with David Shiner and Bill Irwin, and off-Broadway in 2005 with "Lone Star Love" .
Another "day job" for Chris has been scoring music for film and TV. If you stay up late you can sometimes catch TLC's "The Operation" which he scored for six years, and numerous Discovery Channel documentaries, including "The Bald Truth" and "Joined at Birth". He recently finished work on a UNC-TV documentary about Jesse Helms.
Chris founded efolkMusic,com in 1998 as "an internet business, not a dot-com." In 2003 efolkMusic.org was incorporated as a nonprofit to better support this valuable but non-commercial art form. E-mail him your comments and suggestions, and send him your music. He promises to listen!
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"Only the mediocre are always at their best" -- Jean Giraudoux
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Saturday, 01 December 2012 13:23
Here’s a piece I did for a video project that never saw the light of day, of some interest (possibly):
Wednesday, 21 November 2012 12:01
Been there? From the Internet Archive, what they call the “Wayback Machine“, with a history of the Internet- I think they started before us, as they have us from the very beginning, if I remember correctly. Here’s the record of efolkMusic beginning on Oct 9, 1999, and the Wayback Machine has snapshots through the ages! The mission is the same is it ever was, really, same rock to push. Luckily the edges have been worn down through the years and it’s a bit easier to roll. Depending on the size of the rock, you don’t always “pick it up and carry it on..” as we have been known to say; more often it’s OGS – of good size – and you ROLL it. The graphic to the left is a month later, Nov 1999, sorry about the missing graphics. Some of these hairpins are kickin’ grass’ as I write, somewhere, I hope. The idea was grand, using “digital delivery” to get and keep the good music in the air, all with a little compressed file called an “MP3″ that flew across borders, from our servers right into your computer, and nearly frictionless (not to mention green). The market was defined- a large niche of music fans who found no satisfaction listening to most of what they heard on the radio; they also saw their neighborhood record stores close down. Voila, efolkMusic, MP3s by the track, 98 cents. The artists in our broadly-defined “curated” folk music family were required to offer a free MP3 to our website visitors. Most didn’t know what an MP3 was, and were afraid to “give it away” even though they had no other practical way to get their music to the fans. Ah, how times have changed. We became a non-profit in 2003 (May 31st is the first snapshot), and have continued to be a valuable distribution channel for an exceptional roster of too-often overlooked musicians. MP3.com and MySpace have “gone out”, Facebook and Twitter are having their 15 minutes of fame, Google + is too late to the ballgame- we all “compete” (ha!) for your clicking attention, and golly, we are practically venerable by comparison. Folk music does get some respect, but ask any folkie, if you aren’t in it for the ART, and if you aren’t ready for the LONG HAUL, you don’t last long on the bluegrass highway. SO here we are today, thanks to your support- you know the difference between real music and empty cowboy hats, that’s why you are here. Help us keep it going, won’t you?
Thursday, 04 October 2012 14:53
New recording from the Lone Star Love herd: More on their Facebook page
