I was born on campus at the University of North Carolina, where my dad was studying on the G.I bill. Married student housing at UNC in the 1950s was a bunch of World War Two barracks remodeled as “Victory Village,” full of guys just out of the army and their wives, all of whom seemed to have the same haircut, as far as I can tell from the pictures. Birth in Chapel Hill seems to have been destiny for me, in a way, because I later went to grad school in Latin American History at UNC, and now I teach and write books there. If you would like to view my departmental web page, click here.

I have not lived my entire life in Chapel Hill, however. South America—the whole place—is my other home. I have visited every country and lived for periods of months or years in Colombia, Uruguay, Argentina, Cuba, and Brazil. Recently, I have been at work translating historical texts from Spanish and Portuguese into English. Ninteenth and twentieth-century Latin American fiction is my favorite thing to translate. I’ve also written a book on the history of Latin American popular dance. Check it out here.

For many years I was married to a wonderful woman whom I met in South America, Carmen, who made me a vegetarian, gave me a Colombian accent, taught me to dance cumbia (and everything else I know), and brought me two wonderful kids, Ana and Erwin, who long ago ceased being kids and have even produced some kids of their own at this point. Ana lives in Baltimore and Erwin, in Raleigh.

My musical roots spread through the southern region of the United States. My dad, a New Yorker, left UNC in 1960 to take a job in east Texas. I started school there and, after my parents divorced, finished high school in Louisiana before returning to North Carolina for college. My influences start with people like Johnny Cash (see the lyrics to “Hey, Billy”) and run through Bob Dylan, John Prine, and Jerry Jeff Walker before veering even further south across the Caribbean sea, where I discovered a percussive right-hand technique and put down my flat pick forever.

I sing a lot of songs with social or political content. My idea on stage is to act like a sort of twenty-first century version of Woody Guthrie, except that I don’t hop freight trains and I use more chords. I perform a mix of original songs and Guthrie/Dylan stuff, as well as the songs of great Latin American troubadours, like Atahualpa Yupanqui and Violeta Parra.

During the 1980s, Carmen and I regularly sang Chapel Hill’s rice-and-beans solidarity circuit, and we appeared at the first ten Fiestas del Pueblo. Back then, I often intepreted for visiting speakers like union leaders, human rights workers, and once, for a famous revolutionary, Miguel Marmol (see the picture), one of the intended victims of the Salvadoran “matanza” of 1932. Miguel and thousands of others were herded into a mass execution, but Miguel survived it, lying under bloody bodies for hours before crawling out and escaping. On his 1988 visit to Chapel Hill, shortly before he died, I sang him the song “Miguel Marmol” which I had made up the night before.

More recently I live in what used to be the detached kitchen of an eighteenth-century house in Hillsborough and frequent the Blue Bayou Club and the Wooden Nickel Pub. I perform because no experience is more powerful to me than communicating with music, and because I like to wake people up to the great American tradition of singing in dissent.