Collection: Turley, Ken

Ken Turley was raised in Bellevue, just outside of Seattle, WA. He had a typical education, including playing violin, cello and string bass in the school orchestra and an undistinguished devotion to basketball and football. In 1967, he left home to attend Central Washington State College, where he discovered the guitar and Rock’n’Roll. He left school a year and a half later and headed for San Francisco. There, he fulfilled two years of alternate service working at a daycare centre for the physically and mentally handicapped and then for Mother Goose, Inc. This non-profit social service organization performed and taught music, art, dance, and drama to kids in various institutions. During this time, he studied yoga and became a vegetarian while taking in the flourishing local music scene.

In 1973, Ken, three friends and a dog set off across the country in a VW van, playing at coffee houses and bars and staying with new-made friends. They made it to Nova Scotia, where the group broke up, and Ken and one other friend made their way back to San Francisco and then back up to Seattle. There, he received his undergraduate degree in music, attended Seattle Pacific University and the University of Washington, and finally graduated from Evergreen State College in Olympia.

For several years, he taught guitar and bass, arranged music for and performed classical guitar solo, and with a flautist. Later, he played electric guitar in a jazz and rhythm and blues band around the Seattle area.

Tiring of the bar scene and having played in two productions of Godspell, he went to Boston to study music and theology. In 1985, he was ordained and served the next thirty years as pastor in three small-town churches, ending up in Maine. It was during this time that the contents of this book took place. Now retired, he continues to hunt and compose, perform with his wife Laurie, and record secular and sacred
music. A growing number of his composition videos can be found on YouTube, Ken Turley's website, and other music streaming sources.