Highly Literate Songwriting

running the gamut of alt-Americana to cabaret blues

Cory McDaniel

If you were born in Casper, Wyoming to a tractor-wrangler mom and a dad who made his living carving tombstones; if your playground, (right next door to your house), was the local cemetery and your jungle gym was the ceremonial giant cannon set among the mausoleums; would it be a surprise if you grew up with an appetite for the odd, the imperfect, and the blues?
 
When Cory began playing music there were only three high school bands around town: B.C. and the Cavemen, The Novells, and his band, the Eddies. Of course, none of the members were named Eddie.
 
Using fake IDs to get into clubs (Cory's alter-ego was Rex Thorpe), the Eddies played all over Wyoming and Colorado. Finally several band members including Cory migrated to the west coast where they connected with "Earthquake" Anderson, another Wyoming native (who was also Jesse Colin Young's sometime manager and harmonica player), and formed the still-almost-famous-in-Seattle Butterfat, and Earthquake and the Tremors. The years that followed were, well, hard to follow. What do you say about a guy who let Walt Disney's granddaughter pierce his ear in exchange for a ruby earring? What do you say about a band that drank up all Janis Joplin's tequila backstage before the show? Those were the days?

"IT'S EASY....YOU GET ALL THE FACTS AND YOU MAKE IT RHYME"
A lifetime of music on the road and at home has found Cory performing in some far-flung and wondrous places such as the max security prison and  mental hospital in Ramscheid, Germany. At Mettmann Germany's Bluesweek, Cory and bassist Dale Bohren won the festival's Bruno award, so named because of Mettmann's ancient Neandertal sites. 
 
An inveterate storyteller, Cory's made music out of the equally improbable tales of a baby elephant's jump from a German monorail train, a night spent in an Alaskan hotel in the middle of an honest-to-Betsy old west style shoot-out, and an entrepreneurial prostitute who ran an above board and locally beloved brothel in the town of Lusk Wyoming for 60 years: that story's actually been made into a soon to be released PBS documentary featuring Cory's songs. 

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