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Piedmont Talent Inc.
PO. Box 680006
Charlotte, N.C. 28216
704 399 2210
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704 399 2261

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Winner of the 1997 W.C. Handy Award for Best New Artist, the versatile musician has been at his craft for some time. Completely self-taught, he began playing the guitar in earnest at age 14, tooling around in garage bands, soaking up the earthy blues of Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf and the rumble of Link Wray, along with the more skyward flights of Jimi Hendrix and Zappa.  "I never really was away from the blues," Alvin recalls. "All the time that I was learning about pop music of that period, I was learning about the blues."

Born in Oakland, California, Hart moved around the country with his family wherever there was work to be found - Southern California, Ohio, Illinois.  Along the way, he listened to music wherever he could find it, be it his parents' records, the ever-present radio or on Chicago's famed Maxwell Street, where he hung out with grizzled blues vets.  But the most lasting impressions of his youth came from frequent trips to his grandmother's home in the hill country of northern Mississippi, where bloodlines on both sides of his family run back for generations.  On those visits, he found people living a lifestyle that was time out of mind and developed an affinity for certain traditions that had no place in cities like Chicago and Los Angeles.

"So much of myself goes back so far there," he says. "It's important to me to hold on to a little bit of something from the different cultures that evolved the area from which I evolved.  The music is one part of it, perhaps the easiest part of it.  It's a thread I can bring forward."

Those excursions to Mississippi led him to a deep appreciation of his acoustic blues forebears and he steeped himself in their music - Charlie Patton, Leadbelly, Bukka White, Blind Willie McTell, Skip James and others.  He began collecting all manner of vintage stringed instruments, learning to play them, and eventually to restore them.  By 1986, living in Los Angeles, he grew dispassionate about the electric blues scene and turned full time to performing "unplugged" long before it became a marketing strategy.  But with little support from most audiences and the music industry for his brand of blues, Hart opted to join the Coast Guard in 1986.
As fate would have it, he ended up stationed on a riverboat in Natchez, a few hours ride from the family home.  He began to play regularly in front of audiences.  "There was a saloon in Natchez, a kind of an outlaws-plus-tourists type place, and I'd play music in this bar or even outside in the daytime, playing for tips. Whatever band had the weekend gig, they'd have me sit in with them, playing Muddy Waters, Wilson Pickett, whatever songs we all knew."

Seven years in the Coast Guard took him from Natchez to New York to Bolinas, California, where he found a niche in the Bay Area music scene. At a guitar store, he met Heidi Loetscher, who shared his passion for restoring old instruments -- he ended up marrying her.  He also befriended bluesman Joe Louis Walker, who invited Alvin to open for him at several local gigs in 1990.  A year later, he made his first appearance at the San Francisco Blues Festival.  His  hitch up with the Coast Guard, Hart continued to play where and when he could.

In February 1995, he opened for Taj Mahal over a four-night stand at Yoshi's in Oakland.  In the audience were Michael Nash and Carey Williams, who were writing a musical theater piece with Taj, Bob Weir and David Murray, based on the life of baseball legend Satchel Paige.  After inviting Alvin to Weir's studio to play on demos for the musical, they offered to manage his solo career.  Within months, he had a record deal; within a year, his first record hit the streets.

Over the past two years, Alvin has toured extensively throughout the U.S. and Europe.  He has appeared on national tours including the Furthur Festival and House of Blues Presents, sat in on electric guitar with the Allman Brothers Band, and supported musicians ranging from Neil Young, Los Lobos, Richard Thompson and Ben Harper to blues greats John Lee Hooker, Taj Mahal, Buddy Guy and Gatemouth Brown.  In addition to headlining his own club dates, Alvin has played major festivals throughout the world, from Australia to Norway.

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