Chief Billy
Five Brothers Rhapsody

Born and raised in Southern California, Chief Billy started out playing along the beachfront piers and at private parties. Monday nights in the summer he sat in at the open-mic night at Sid’s Blue Beat at Newport Beach.

He formed his first Jug Band at eighteen playing high school dances and concerts for the Chi Ro Club at his former grammar school auditorium. In 1970 he moved East where he worked on the railroad between Detroit and Kansas City. After hours, he performed his music and beat poetry in salons, railroad saloons, libraries and gin mills alike, taking a year off to work as roadie for Patti LaBelle out of their 57th Street office in Manhattan.

In the eighties, he moved to Tampa, Florida from where he began touring Europe. “Back then we were touring back and forth between Tampa/St. Pete and the Scandinavian countries with stopovers in Amsterdam to play the Melkveg and Anna’s Face of Folk bar. We were working six months in the States and six months overseas. In ’84, I moved over there. We were still working six months there and six months here. I just had a new mailing address.”

During that decade in Europe, Chief Billy worked with a diverse and hip line up of second generation R&B and Blues artists, including Carey Bell, Diz Watson, Coco Robicheaux, Chicago Bob, Reverend Billy C. Wirtz, Roy Book Binder and Rock Bottom with whom he did a stateside TV spot on Nashville Now with Book Binder’s Hillbilly Blues Cats, then on Rounder Records.

He performed at numerous festivals with return engagements at the folk jazz & blues festivals in Lugano, Switzerland; Tonder, Denmark; Notodden, Norway, and The Polish Jazz Society Club Rura Festival in Wroclaw, Poland. He logged miles of concerts and club dates throughout Greece, Germany, and England with dates at the Bath Blues Festival and the Half Moon Putney and the Weavers in London and the Bridge House in Newcastle,

Since arriving in Key West in 1994, he has done day, evening and night shifts along Duval St., at Sloppy Joe’s & the Bull, plus events and benefits at the Casa Marina, The Galleon, The Pier House Beach, Ocean Key House, Bottle Cap Lounge, Don’s Place, community schools, The Cayo Carnival, business openings and private parties, and solo gigs at Virgilio’s, Capt. Hornblowers, Applerouth Grille, Blue Heaven, Geiger Key Marina, Schooner Wharf Bar, The Green Parrot, Turtle Kraal’s, Atlantic Shores, and
B O’s Fish Wagon.