While not a Colorado native, Robert Neale Lind called the state home. Lind was born November 25, 1944 in Baltimore Maryland. He attended high school in Aurora, Colorado where he formed his first band: The Moonlighters. After graduating, he enrolled at Western State College in Gunnison, where he focused on playing guitar to the exclusion of academics. During this time, Lind led a rock cover band known as Bob Lind & The Misfits. He dropped out of college and moved to Denver, where he became immersed in the folk music scene and took coffeehouses such as The Exodus, The Green Spider and The Analyst by storm.

Late one night, Lind wrote a song with vivid imagery and an extended, metaphoric narrative—“Elusive Butterfly.” Al Chapman, owner of The Analyst, had made a tape of Lind which included “Elusive Butterfly” and suggested he show it to some record labels. In early 1965, the singer-songwriter moved to California where he pitched his new song to World Pacific Records, winning a contract. His first session with noted arranger Jack Nitzsche yielded the single “Cheryl’s Goin’ Home,” which serves as the A-side for “Elusive Butterfly.” It had been out for about a month during the Christmas season when a disc jockey at a Florida radio station flipped the disc over to the B-side. Listeners flipped, too.

Follow-up singles charted on Denver’s KIMN Radio but barely cracked the national charts. After moving to New Mexico in 1971, he recorded and released his third album Since There Were Circles. This mix of country, folk and rock expressed Lind’s talent, but his new label at the time, Capitol Records, didn’t promote the release enough, resulting in low record sales. Lind put his music career aside, moved to Florida and became a novelist and screenwriter. 

Over the years, more than 200 artists recorded his songs. In 2004, he resumed performing worldwide. His 2012 album, Finding You Again, has been hailed by some critics as his best work ever with its Baroque accents and arrangements collaborating with Jamie Hoover of the Spongetones. 2016 saw the release of Lind’s darker lyrical album, Magellan was Wrong, followed up with 2022’s Something Worse Than Loneliness.

Today, Lind continues to make music and hails his own latest release, Something Worse Than Loneliness, as his best album yet. Lind was inducted into the Colorado Music Hall of Fame with the induction class of 2013.

“I started in folk with Magic Music. Lee Aronsohn, co-creator of Two and a Half Men and The Big Bang Theory, made an award-winning 2018 documentary about that hippie band and the Boulder music heyday of the 1970s. It’s called 40 Years in the Making: The Magic Music Movie. That traveling circus and touring with Russell Smith of the Amazing Rhythm Aces led me to start my own band, Chris Daniels & the Kings. We’ve toured Europe 21 times, made 15 albums, two with Freddi Gowdy, and been nominated for a Grammy. So you could say folk music gave me the ride of my life.”

After leaving the area to earn a B.A. in music and journalism at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota, and Berklee College of Music in Boston, Daniels returned to found Spoons, an influential Boulder rock band.

In the early 1980s, he toured with former Amazing Rhythm Aces frontman Russell Smith and founded the notorious After Hours Jams at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival.

In May 1984, Daniels formed a rhythm and blues horn band as a “one-night party” at the Blue Note in Boulder. After building a following on the Colorado circuit, Chris Daniels & the Kings hit the road and established loyal regional audiences in such places as Nashville, Minneapolis, New York and even the Netherlands.

In 1971, the band left Los Angeles to relocate in the Colorado mountains, with the members settling into their respective wooded communities.

Success arrived with their fifth album, Uncle Charlie & His Dog Teddy; Hanna’s take on Jerry Jeff Walker’s “Mr. Bojangles” made the Top 10 pop charts. The new Colorado residents went to see traditional country-music icons Earl Scruggs and Doc Watson perform at Tulagi in Boulder.

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.

He contributed several compositions to the repertoire—the best-known being “Colorado”—before launching his own career as a solo artist. Bartley had started as a student of jazz guitar great Johnny Smith, a Colorado Springs resident.

The brainchild of Stephen Stills, Manassas was a genre-bending amalgamation of a band that produced two albums. In the impactful 18 months that the band played together, they left a mark on music history in Colorado and the world over.

After splitting ways with Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Stills retreated to the mountains near Gold Hill in Boulder County, Colorado. The morning after receiving the news of the death of his friend, Jimi Hendrix, Stills posed for the cover photo of his first solo album on September 20, 1970 with Gold Hill’s magnificence surrounding him. Stills wrote songs for his second solo album that winter in Colorado. Settling in, he named his publishing company Gold Hill Music, Inc.

Four years earlier, singer Chris Hillman had helped Stephen Stills and Buffalo Springfield land a gig at the famous Whisky a Go Go in Los Angeles. The two ran into each other again one night at Tulagi, a Boulder nightspot, when Hillman’s band, The Flying Burrito Brothers, was playing Stills suggested Hillman, guitarist Al Perkins and fiddler Byron Berline leave the band and join him in Miami to jam. The three of them agreed, and Stills booked Criteria Studios to begin his next project.

Born May 25, 1877 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, William Thomas Murray and his family moved to Denver five years later, where he spent most of his early years expressing an interest in show business. Following a stint as part of a “rube” song-and-dance act with neighborhood pals, Murray’s parents allowed him to join Harry Leavitt’s High Rollers troupe as an actor at age 16.

He spent the next decade honing his skills in a succession of minstrel shows and small-time vaudeville venues. Murray joined the Al G. Field Minstrels around the turn of the century, and it was there the title performer gave Murray the nickname “Billy,” since it sounded more like a comedian’s name.

Murray found his way to New York, where he would achieve success in the rapidly emerging field of phonography. His first recordings were made in 1897 with partner Matt Keefe. In 1903, he secured an engagement with Thomas Edison’s National Phonograph Company, and his solo recordings, released and marketed nationwide, became immediate hits. Murray did not have an exclusive contract with Edison, freelancing his voice to several major recording companies including Columbia and Victor. Often, he recorded the same songs for each label. Murray’s ability to sing loudly, in full voice, was suited for making precise, vibrant records during the acoustic era of sound process, which employed recording horns rather than the electronic microphone. He was soon dubbed “the Denver Nightingale.”

The youngest of four children, Elizabeth Spencer was born Elizabeth Dickerson on April 12, 1871; her father died eight months later. In 1874, her mother remarried to Colonel William Gilpin, who had served as the first governor of the Territory of Colorado in 1861. The family moved to Denver. Spencer received vocal training and learned to sing, recite stories and poetry and play piano and violin. She graduated from St. Mary’s Academy in Englewood, Colorado and, after an extensive European tour, married Otis Spencer, an attorney. A recognized society woman, Spencer sang in churches, concerts, clubs, parties and amateur theatricals.

She got her big break in 1905, performing a successful solo act at the local Orpheum Theater, her professional debut in a major vaudeville house. Her second engagement, a one-act sketch, displayed her acting abilities and the experience led to roles in Broadway road companies. By 1910 she was residing in New York City and making her first recordings. Signing an exclusive contract with inventor and businessman Thomas Edison’s company, Spencer’s “dramatic soprano” was heard on numerous studio recordings, participating in solos, duets, trios, quartets and choruses. One of these groups was known as the Homestead Trio which consisted of Spencer and two other female vocalists, Amy Ellerman and Betsy Lane Shepherd.

Born in Denver on March 28, 1890, Paul Samuel Whiteman was raised by musician parents. His mother Efrida was an opera singer, and his father Wilberforce James served as director of music for Denver Public Schools. As a student at East High School, Whiteman was highly encouraged to learn an instrument and gravitated towards viola. Showing an innate talent for the instrument, Whiteman was quickly picked up by the Denver Symphony Orchestra in 1907 at the ripe age of 17. From there, he moved to the west coast and joined the San Francisco Symphony. 

In 1918, Whiteman enlisted in the U.S. Navy and led a 12-piece band known as the Mare Island Naval Training Camp Symphony Orchestra for the next year. After the war, he returned to San Francisco and formed Paul Whiteman & His Orchestra, serving as the house band for the city’s luxurious Fairmont Hotel. By 1920, the nine-piece ensemble relocated to New York City. There they played the Palais Royal for the next four years—the earliest dance band from the West to take the East Coast by storm. In 1924, Whiteman staged a concert blending symphonic music and jazz at Aeolian Hall, New York’s temple of classical music. For the event, Whiteman commissioned George Gershwin to write a new orchestral piece, though Gershwin only had five weeks to complete the project before the concert. Gershwin finished composing the now famous “Rhapsody in Blue” and handed it off to Ferde Grofé for arranging. The two made it work with eight days to spare. Gershwin himself played piano and introduced New York to “Rhapsody in Blue,” which quickly became Whiteman’s theme song.

He then enrolled at the University of Colorado, where he spent his time outside of class playing in fellow student Holly Moyer’s band.

He left college in 1923 to devote his full attention to his career as a musician and arranger.

Joining Ben Pollack’s band, Miller went to Los Angeles, to Chicago, and eventually to New York in early 1928, where he married his college sweetheart, Helen Burger. After leaving Pollack, Miller joined Smith Ballew’s orchestra, then the newly formed Dorsey Brothers band.