Terry Kitchen

Songwriter Terry Kitchen, a native of Easton, PA, traveled down two paths in his music in 2001. One led him down the way of big social questions and spirituality. The other took him more casually into the realm of social issues faced in everyday life. As a youth, he confronted religious doctrines, which he paid tribute to in his song, "Martin Luther," an account of the religious leader's rebelliousness with questions about contemporary society's ability to maintain that quest for spiritual truth, from his 2000 CD, Blues for Cain and Abel. Kitchen experienced the premature death of his sister in Easton, yet it's a place where he grew into social activism and where songs shared around a campfire budded his interest in songwriting. Years later, Kitchen married his wife, Cindy, a documentary filmmaker, and the two shared a space in Watertown, MA, near where he worked at his day job as production materials coordinator for the country's largest folk and roots music label, Rounder Records, in 2001. Kitchen (born Max Pokrivchak) held fond memories of St. John's Lutheran Church, where in his youth he learned about social activism, religion, and life from former St. John's minister, Reverend John Steinbruck. Songs from his 2001 CD, Right Now (named after his award-winning song), concerned social issues he saw arising in the lives of people from his everyday experiences. The song "Billy" told about a boy giving a Valentine's Day card to another boy at his grade school. Kitchen himself confronted feelings of being an outsider after his family moved from Easton to Findlay, OH, in the early '70s. His sister was still ill with a kidney disease and was being treated at the Cleveland Clinic Hospital, so Kitchen's father, George, got a transfer from his job as a chemical engineer at RCA...