Country

USA, resident in Germany

Kent Gustavson, PhD, is the author of ‘Blind but Now I See’, the award-winning biography of Doc Watson, as well as the composer of ‘Mountain Vespers’, a bluegrass liturgy in constant use at Holden Village for over 20 years to thousands of worshippers, and ‘Light into the World’, a bluegrass liturgy that was commissioned by Nadia Bolz-Weber and supported by the Calvin Institute for Christian Worship (Lilly Foundation), which is in active rotation within hundreds of congregations around the world. 

He has released a long list of recordings, including Stolen Shack, his trio that combines bluegrass with Baroque music, and was featured on NPR’s All Songs Considered. He is currently dusting off his bass, guitar, banjo, mandolin, and sometimes piano on several recording projects, and is a member of various ensembles across genres. 

Kent is the founder of several companies, and has served on multiple boards of directors. His PhD and MA are from Stony Brook University in New York, in Classical Composition, and he has taught at several universities in the Music, Writing, Language, and Business faculties. 

Kent says: “When I spoke with Pete Seeger before his passing, he spoke with me about how his own mentor, Carl Sandburg, told him about how Swedes were treated in Chicago, and called “dirty Swedes”; I am descended from those “dirty Swedes”, at once American and also European, scrabbling at existence, whether in the famined potato fields, the New World’s railroads, in the factories, or tuck-pointing on the sides of Chicago’s skyscrapers. Like Pete, the son of an academic, I was the son of a physician and a poet, yet I hungered for the beautiful whine and whirr of the bluer side; that’s what I found in bluegrass, after a childhood of classical, jazz and folk.”

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