Tom Pacheco

Born on November 4, 1946, in New Bedford, Massachusetts, to jazz guitarist Tony Pacheco, Tom Pacheco took up the same instrument by age ten. At nineteen he issued his first solo collection of original material, Turn Away from the Storm. He next assembled the psychedelic folk-rock ensemble the Ragamuffins and cut a pair of singles, then joined Sharon Alexander in Euphoria, whose self-titled album appeared on Heritage Records in 1969. The duo Pacheco & Alexander followed on CBS Records in 1971.

Two solo RCA albums arrived in 1976: Swallowed Up in the Great American Heart and The Outsider. In 1978 Pacheco settled in Woodstock, New York, where he assembled the Hellhounds for local shows; he moved to Austin, Texas, in 1981, formed another Hellhounds lineup, then returned to Woodstock in 1983 and revived the original group. Nashville drew him in 1986, after which he made Dublin his European base for the next decade, releasing Eagle in the Rain in 1989, Sunflowers & Scarecrows in 1991, Tales from the Red Lake in 1992, the duet album Big Storm Comin’ with Norwegian singer Steinar Albrigtsen in 1993, and Luck of the Angels in 1994.

He returned to Woodstock in 1997 to record what is widely regarded as his strongest work, Woodstock Winter, produced by Band guitarist Jim Weider at Levon Helm’s studio with additional contributions from Helm and Rick Danko. Although it earned strong critical notice, the album never reached a wide domestic audience, and Pacheco stayed a cult artist in the United States. Further European releases included the acoustic set Bare Bones and Barbed Wire in 1998, the Weider-produced The Lost American Songwriter in 1999, and a second collaboration with Albrigtsen, Nobodies, in 2000.

Appleseed Recordings issued There Was a Time in 2002; two more albums followed in 2004, Long Walk and another Weider-produced effort, Year of the Big. Pacheco’s songs have been widely covered by folk and country artists and are often regarded as exceptional, yet he remains little known in America despite his European success—an odd circumstance, given that his voice and outlook are as enduringly American, and at times as political, as those of Woody Guthrie.