These are the inductees we have been able to get to since our founding in 2011, but there is still much to do – if you would like to get involved, please visit our suggestion box and donation page for ways you can become part of the legacy.
Swallow Hill Music has a long and impressive history as Denver’s home of roots music: folk, bluegrass, old-time, acoustic, Americana and beyond. The concept grew out of the idea that roots music concerts, and teaching enthusiasts how to play that music, could be combined into a nonprofit association.
According to Denver rock critic and historian Gil Asakawa, seeing the Mother Folkers, aka the MoFos, was “like watching the musical mix-and-match of the Band’s Last Waltz movie, only live, here in Denver.” With all women! Denver Folklore Center founder Harry Tuft always chuckled repeating when the act’s oft-quoted tag line…
The most difficult part of inducting Richard Weissman into the Colorado Music Hall of Fame presented by Comfort Dental is crediting only one aspect of his long career as the catalyst for the inclusion. Weissman is an award-winning musician, a songwriter, and author of more than 22 books about everything from banjo instruction to music business in the current century, an educator who helped create the Music Business Program at the University of Colorado Denver and a historian.
Born on May 20, 1929, the year of the great stock market crash, Billy Robinson was adopted by Wallace and Ethel Conley, who raised him in Scottsbluff, Nebraska, as Walter Bell Conley. After his adoptive father died in 1944, Walt and his mother moved to Denver, where he graduated from Manual High School, one of the first “integrated” high schools in Colorado, in 1949.
Rusty Young got his musical start in Böenzee Cryque, a Denver-based band that recorded for Uni Records. The double-sided 45 “Still in Love with You Baby” backed with “Sky Gone Gray” went to No. 1 on the hit list of KIMN, Denver’s dominant Top 40 station, in April 1967. On the West Coast, Richie Furay had formed Buffalo Springfield with Stephen Stills and Neil Young. His song “Kind Woman” made the Springfield perhaps the first rock band to experiment with a country sound. Furay called his friend from Colorado, Rusty Young, to play pedal steel guitar on the session.
On November 28, 2017, at the Historic Paramount Theater, the Colorado Music Hall of Fame presented by Comfort Dental hosted a concert and induction ceremony for Colorado’s Jazz Masters – bassist Charles Burrell, guitarist Bill Frisell, cornet player Ron Miles, singer Dianne Reeves, and Philip Bailey, Larry Dunn, and Andrew Woolfolk from Earth, Wind & Fire.
Coming out of the fluid California scene of the late 1960s, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band hit upon a unique Americana style. The thread of Jeff Hanna and Jimmy Ibbotson’s acoustic guitars and brother-like harmonies, John McEuen’s string wizardry, Jimmie Fadden’s utilitarian prowess and Les Thompson’s mandolin rounded out the sound. At shows at Denver’s Marvelous Marv’s nightclub in early 1970, the band played to enthusiastic crowds.