Stephen Lee Rich
35 Years and Still Yodeling!
Your Friendly, Neighborhood, Yodeling Cowboy
can’t stop now!
Most teenage boys hang up their guitars after securing their first
full-time job, but Stephen Lee Rich, after winning a talent contest at
the county fair in Mariposa, California in 1969, has kept the music,
jokes, and yodels coming.
The 1970’s found Rich learning and honing his craft at such seminal
Chicago clubs as the Earl of Oldtown, the Barbarossa, Somebody
Else’s Troubles, and the No Exit Café. An article about him as a street
musician – published in August of 1979 by the Reader, Chicago’s
alternative newspaper – inspired then-mayor Jane Byrne to put
city-sponsored street musicians at strategic places around the city
the following summer. They called it the Troubadour Program.
In the 1980’s, when the folk venues started to disappear, he
began working at comedy venues like Zanies, the Comedy Cottage,
and Kobart’s Komedy Kove. He soon joined forces with a number
of variety acts to inaugurate the Revolving Door Revue, a touring troupe
whose peripatetic engagements first brought Stephen Lee to
Wisconsin – specifically Fort Atkinson’s Café Carpe and Madison’s
Wild Hog In The Woods Coffeehouse.
35 Years –P.2
Relocating to Madison in 1995 to sing country music for The Road
Band, he soon found work at the Anchor Inn, in Madison, as the host of
their weekly acoustic jam. He also became one of the rotating hosts of
the open mic at Mother Fool’s Coffeehouse. Eventually he found his
own venue running the open mic at Speed Jump Java Joint which
late last year moved to Urban Market and Coffeehouse on Madison’s
east side.
In 2002 his first CD, Facing Monday, further expanded his territory
south into downstate Illinois, to Naperville’s Fat Bean, Lansing,
Illinois’s Muse Café, and north into Michigan’s U.P. at Escanaba’s
8th Street Café’ and the Grand Marais Songwriter’s Festival. This year
he will be, for the second year running, both host and a featured
performer at the Edgerton Log Cabin Days Bluegrass and Folk
Festival in Edgerton, Wisconsin. He has also performed on Wisconsin
Public Radio’s “Higher Ground with Jonathan Overby” which is heard
state-wide on WPR’s Ideas Network.
Rich is currently working with the Madison-based record label
Travenia Records, for which he is producing a CD with his long-time
musical partner Sandy Andina and a new solo CD.