Bruce Piephoff

Singer and songwriter Bruce Piephoff maintains deep ties to the music community in Greensboro, NC, where he was born, and he logged considerable time as an artist-in-residence at schools and colleges across multiple Southern states until government support for the initiative ended. In fall 2002 he was finishing work on the album Hard Times for Dreamers, a project whose title captures the ongoing struggles faced by any non-commercial musician trying to earn a living through original work. Greensboro itself offers scant encouragement for an artist of his stripe. Across roughly thirty years of activity, stretches of multiple years have passed without a single local club booking music in Piephoff’s vein, and only a handful of the city’s record stores stock his output, all of it issued on his own Flyin’ Cloud imprint. Local radio likewise ignores his recordings, as it does other area music.

Piephoff came to music relatively late, first picking up the guitar at eighteen while enrolled at UNC-Chapel Hill. His father, a casual guitarist, had introduced him to folk recordings by Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie, and the Weavers; Piephoff still keeps those original LPs along with the elder Piephoff’s Martin D-35. His own performing career began on the small stages of Chapel Hill coffeehouses. Although his early sets drew on covers by Dylan, Hank Williams, Lightnin’ Hopkins, the Carter Family, John Prine, Townes Van Zandt, Tom Waits, and the legendary Chapel Hill fingerpicker Elizabeth Cotten, he started writing and presenting original songs from the outset.

Music soon pulled him away from conventional paths. During his sophomore year he left college to pursue a career, spending time in the busy scenes of both New York City and Nashville. He later returned to academics, earning a B.A. in English and an M.F.A. in creative writing at UNCG in Greensboro. There he studied poetry with Fred Chappell and Robert Watson and began distinguishing pure poetry from song lyrics in his own practice. Albums such as the excellent Slaughterhouse incorporate both recited poems and sung material.

In 1986 Piephoff joined the North Carolina Visiting Artist Program, a respected statewide effort that stationed performers working in idioms including old-time music and jazz at venues throughout North Carolina. His first assignment sent him to Southeastern Community College in the remote town of Whiteville. The one-year post came with salary and health benefits that, for a working musician, felt almost providential. Duties centered on performances at schools, churches, and nonprofit gatherings in Whiteville and surrounding communities, plus exchanges with fellow artists in the only program of its kind in the United States. Subsequent residencies took him to Brunswick County near the coast, to Valencia Community College in Orlando, FL, and back to North Carolina for a post at Anson Community College in Wadesboro. His last funded placement under the program was at Cleveland Community College in Shelby, NC. Virginia maintained parallel artist-in-residence initiatives, allowing Piephoff to continue similar work in parts of that state, among them Danville.

By 2001 the picture had changed. After Newt Gingrich and the Contract with America, arts budgets had shrunk so severely that they no longer supported even modest engagements. Piephoff returned to depending on live performances and his own recordings. He had begun pressing singles in the 1980s and issued full collections on cassette starting in 1990, among them Hamburger Square, whose title, like much of his material, nods to a historic neighborhood in downtown Greensboro. That set later appeared on compact disc paired with Anson County, a 1993 release that signals a more polished and mature phase in his development. Subsequent recordings have regularly featured some of the region’s strongest players, among them mandolinist Arnie Soloman, Dobro and lap-steel specialist Scott Manring, and percussionist Murray Reams.