Steve Gillette

If there's an unfortunate aspect to Steve Gillette's career, it's that he was born just a little too late to become a star on the folk circuit during the boom days of the early-'60s folk revival. With his unabashedly romantic voice and the right ballad, he might've easily soared into the Top Ten in an era in which songs like "Michael" and "Green Green" were scaling the pop charts; he might even have beaten his younger southern California contemporary Jackson Browne to the punch, as a star singer as well as a songwriter, while the latter was passing in and out of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and falling in and out of love with Nico. But, then again, if he had done that, chances are that some record label would've insisted on tarting up Gillette's music with too big accompaniments and turning him into a folk-pop star, and at the end of the day, between expenses and overhead and the lousy contracts that were out there in the 1960s, he'd have had little to show for the compromises he'd have made. Instead, Gillette has retained his integrity and earned a ton of respect from people who know and love music, and it's been enough for a busy, solid career in folk music, as a singer/songwriter, and a country musician. He grew up in Southern California, in a musical household. His first musical memories were filled with his father, an enthusiastic pianist and singer, doing songs by Hoagy Carmichael, Fats Waller, and Johnny Mercer. And both of his parents and their friends sang at parties, their repertory usually embracing whatever was in Hit Parade, whence he learned songs such as "Down in the Valley" and "Frankie & Johnnie," what passed for folk music in middle-class California households; and when his father picked up on the music of Erroll Garner, it was passed along to the...