Tim Lake

Tim Lake has earned widespread acclaim as a composer, songwriter, and recording artist across a career exceeding twenty years. Most of the releases on LSR Records and on his own imprint, Padraig Records, feature his original compositions, although a selection of enduring standards also appears. Beginning in 1994, the ASCAP Standard Awards Panel recognized his writing for six consecutive years. The organization’s Popular Awards Panel further honored him in 2000 and again in 2001. While completing doctoral studies in music at the University of Kentucky, Lake composed “An American Concerto for Five-String Banjo and Orchestra,” which received the Kentucky Al Smith Fellowship for Music Composition in 1995; he was awarded the doctorate itself in 1991. Two years after completing the work, he presented the concerto in Georgia, accompanied by the Atlanta-Emory Orchestra.

Additional distinctions include an honorable mention in Columbia Records’ 1982 Recording Artist Search and an award from the Music City Song Festival in 1984. In 1989 he placed in the Great Smokies Songchase and received an ASCAP scholarship. His name appeared in Who’s Who Among Rising Young Americans in 1992, and the Kentucky Arts Council awarded him a grant in 1997.

Born in New York, Lake spent his formative years in Lexington, Kentucky. He obtained a bachelor’s degree in music from the University of Kentucky in 1983, followed four years later by a second bachelor’s in history; a master’s degree in music composition from the same institution was conferred in 1988. Since 1973 he has earned his living as a guitarist and banjoist while also teaching music. From 1984 until 1992 he served on the faculty of his alma mater, instructing courses in music theory, Appalachian music history, and performance on banjo and guitar. The next year he founded Padraig Publishing and Padraig Records. He is the author of several method books for guitar and banjo as well as numerous articles published in Acoustic Musician.

As leader of the Little Big Band, Lake has appeared throughout the United States and abroad at Ecuador’s Festival of the Fruits and Flowers, Japan’s Le Mani Theater and Bay Side Pocket Theater, Austria’s Begegnung Festival, and Norway’s Telemark Festival. His collaborators have included Lester Flatt, Earl Scruggs, John Prine, the Cox Family, Doc Watson, Bill Monroe, Alison Krauss, John Hartford, Vassar Clements, Grupo Criolle de Venezuela, Red Clay Ramblers, Béla Fleck, John D. Loudermilk, Si Kahn, and Maura O’Connell. His music was featured in the 1992 PBS documentary Made and Bottled in Kentucky and supplied original cues for the PBS film El Toro en la Selva.