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Steve Fowler |
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I’ve always had a love of
music. I started playing the trumpet
in third grade even though at the time I really wanted to play guitar. At that time, 1960, there wasn’t much call
for guitar in the school band. I can
remember an early love of Celtic music with groups like the Irish Rovers and
I loved listening to the pipe bands on the Rose Parade in Pasadena. By high school I’d learned to play the
guitar and did short stint playing folk music with a group of friends in
Eugene. It wasn’t until I moved to
Washington D.C. with the Navy in the mid 80s that I really started pursuing
my interest in folk and Celtic music starting first with the hammered
dulcimer. On a trip with my wife to
Scotland, England and Wales I purchased my first practice chanter in shop in
Edinburgh. Despite my best intentions
to learn to play the pipes I was never able to get started as we were moving
every couple of years. After retiring from the
Navy in 2002 we moved back to Oregon and I went to work in the Information
Systems department at Oregon State University a year later. I hadn’t thought much about playing the
pipes until my wife, Debbie, pointed out an ad in a flyer offering bagpipe
lessons by a local piper, Scotty Dutton.
Well, that is all it took. I contacted
Scotty and started lessons. Not
wanting to be a lone piper I started looking for a local pipe band to join
when I ran across the OSDFPB playing at a meeting of the Oregon Pipers
Society in Portland. |
