Larry Hanks Saturday 11:00a Event Area K Beginning Jew's Harp Saturday 2:00p Event Area K Beginning Jew's Harp Sunday 10:30a Event Area A Jew's Harp For All: Explore the magic of the Jew's Harp. Participants will receive and keep their own instrument. Audio Sample Lonesome Cowboy's Breakfast Maquiladoras

Larry Hanks is a guitarist, Jew's harper, and singer of a wide variety of traditional American folksong styles -- old-time country and cowboy songs, ballads and blues, and fiddle tunes played on the Jew's harp -- as well as children's songs, and topical and contemporary songs from such writers as Malvina Reynolds, Utah Phillips, Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Larry Penn, Peggy Seeger, and Mark Graham, as well as the Carter Family, Jimmie Rodgers and Hank Williams.

Since 1962 he has been performing up and down the West Coast and nationally, at folk clubs, coffeehouses, concerts and festivals, including Vancouver (BC), Mariposa (Toronto), Smithsonian Festival of American Folklife, Fox Hollow (Petersburg,NY), San Diego, Wesleyan University Festival of Traditional Song, Adams Avenue Roots Festival (San Diego), and the 1st Annual California Folk Festival (Folsom, '02). He toured the folk clubs in England, Scotland and Wales with Faith Petric and Laura Smith in 1980, and Finland in '02.

He has been an instructor at the Puget Sound Guitar Workshop and the Festival of American Fiddle Tunes (Port Townsend, WA). He was the guest Jew's harper with the Fresno (CA) Philharmonic, playing Charles Ives' "Washington's Birthday", and has attended International Jew's harp (trump) Congresses at Iowa City ('84), Yakutsk, Siberia ('91), Molln, Austria ('98), and Rauland, Norway in 2002.

His album "Tying A Knot in the Devil's Tail", originally issued on Long Sleeve Records in 1984, has recently been re-issued in CD format on the Dandelion label. He also appears with his friend Mike Marker in the CD “The Truth for Certain,” a collection of outstanding original songs and traditional favorites.

This is Larry’s first year as a staff member with the California Autoharp Gathering. We are delighted and thrilled to have his presence to light-up our venue!