TROY GREGORINO - info
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Troy Gregorino's music is as honest as it is sometimes oblique, both revealing and conflicted. Bittersweetness binds together a mosaic of personal trials and the human condition. Michael Stipe and John Lennon wrestling with Phil Ochs and George Harrison in a Mississippi cotton field, Gregorino's is a unique sound of folk and delta blues bathed in rock.

His music is as varied and ever-changing as the life experiences by which it's inspired - from a childhood stint in inner city Nashville to various incarnations as a writer, artist, critic, and social justice activist. It's a spirited, unorthodox merging of melodic brightness and raw grit. Noted for his aimless travels and fiery rabble-rousing, Gregorino found Athens, Ohio, on a whim in 2002. He stayed for more than two years, taking his guitar with him to countless dives, coffee houses, and southeastern Ohio's Hock Hocking Folk Festival. A featured performer at a recent commemoration for those killed in 1970 by national guardsmen during anti-war protests at Kent State University (where Gregorino received a journalism degree) and Mississippi's Jackson State College, he also frequents stages, festivals, river banks, train cars, front porches and back roads throughout the country.

Shortly after his abrupt departure from Athens, Ohio, to Athens, Georgia, came reports that Gregorino had been diagnosed with advanced-stage cancer, and that emergency treatments were necessary. He'd soon be transported to the Cleveland, Ohio, area, where he's remained for additional chemotherapy and lung surgery. Bed-ridden for several months in 2005, Gregorino is back on the mend. He said he works on regaining his strength by taking walks through the woods of northeastern Ohio, a place from which he's determined to some day resurface with new songs and stories.

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