Beeman & Bannon

The band members have known each other since the Hoboken Saturday Nite folk music days where any of the band members could be found making music in Ginny Parrott's photography studio; Jim & Beverly Hans' loft, Ron Hines' pottery studio, Steve Kilnisian's comic book store, Warren Gardner's apt. and  Gene Turonis' home.  Barbara, Bill & John always enjoyed each other's company and Bill & Barbara would be in awe of John's songwriting talent and would always make sure we learned John's tunes as fast as we could before he started to change them.

While Barbara & Bill continuously played together as a duo and with other bands like Red Zoom & the DIxie Darlins' (with Warren Gardner, Roger Martin, John Calligy, Steve Friedberg) and Heartsnares with Ken Haferman and Rob Hunter, we also played as the Barbara Beeman Band with Ted Dunn, Mike Gatten & Tony Gutierrez.  Through the course of the years, we played as an Old Time String Band and won a band award from Doug Tuckman's Old Time Music shows. We also played as a folk-rock band.  In later years, we have played the blues and now work with John on our sometimes gipsy sometimes jazzy folk tunes. We like music from all ages and in many different styles - 1930's jazz tunes; standards; folk (English, American); country; and tunes with clever spoken lyrics.

John has played with countless musicians through the years (Lily Parrott, Nancy Jeffries, Bill Barth, Ron Raffel, Luke Faust, Betty Berken,Gene Turonis, Peter Stampfel & more) and he is always expanding his repertoire of original songs.  He has taken a recent shine to creating standards which could have been made popular in the heyday of the 1930's music scene.