News and Ideas from the Bleeding Edge

Chris Frank has been making music for over 50 years. His Hawaiian music teacher showed him some chords on the ukulele when he was in kindergarten, and he just kept playing.

His professional debut was at the age of fourteen, playing bass in his brother’s garage band. They actually had a gig, saving Senior Prom night from disaster by filling in for the “professionals” who never showed up. At fifteen he got a “steady” job with “Gib Krisinger & His Orchestra” playing fireman’s balls and country clubs almost every Friday and Saturday Night. It was a six-piece band with an average age of about 40, and he learned “Moonglow” and “The Sheik of Araby” and many of their relatives in his four years with Gib. (They stopped booking gigs around 2001. It was his dad’s band before he took over, so the Krisinger band probably worked over a 50 year period.)

From there it was sensitive singer-songwriter (the “college years”, where he also picked up a degree in music at the University of Iowa), elementary school teacher, a few years on the road, solo and with a few bands, and finally settling down in Chapel Hill, NC. He eventually wormed his way into The Red Clay Ramblers, and continues with them today. The Ramblers are active in concert, film (scoring and appearing in two of Sam Shepard’s works) and stage, thrice thrust upon the Broadway boards, winning a Tony Award in 1999 for “Fool Moon” with David Shiner and Bill Irwin, and off-Broadway in 2005 with “Lone Star Love”
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Another “day job” for Chris has been scoring music for film and TV. If you stay up late you can sometimes catch TLC’s “The Operation” which he scored for six years, and numerous Discovery Channel documentaries, including “The Bald Truth” and “Joined at Birth”. He recently finished work on a UNC-TV documentary about Jesse Helms.

Chris founded efolkMusic,com in 1998 as “an internet business, not a dot-com.” In 2003 efolkMusic.org was incorporated as a nonprofit to better support this valuable but non-commercial art form. E-mail him your comments and suggestions, and send him your music. He promises to listen!