Mark Graham

Mark Alan Graham was born in 1953 in Renton, Washington. He has said that Homer and Jethro’s album At the Country Club first turned him toward humorous country songs, and his writing draws as much on satirists such as Tom Lehrer and the Smothers Brothers as on the old-time music of Uncle Dave Macon.

He came up in old-time bands. He recorded with Seattle’s Hurricane Ridgerunners, whose first album came out on Topaz in 1981, and with the Chicken Chokers, who shared a 1985 album with the Horseflies and made Shoot Your Radio for Rounder in 1987; both bands appear on the 1985 anthology The Young Fogies. He has also recorded or played with the Texas fiddler Benny Thomasson, Tom and Patrick Sauber, Pete Sutherland, Laurie Lewis and Bryan Bowers, and he played on Kevin Burke’s 1984 album Up Close. His album Natural Selections appeared in 1987.

In the 1990s he was a member of Kevin Burke’s Open House, playing harmonica and clarinet and singing on its Green Linnet albums Open House (1992) and Second Story (1994) and on Hoof and Mouth (1997). Over the same years he became a regular harmonica player on Tim O’Brien’s records: Tim and Mollie O’Brien’s Remember Me (1992), Tim O’Brien and the O’Boys’ Oh Boy! O’Boy! (1993) and Rock in My Shoe (1995), and O’Brien’s 1996 album of Bob Dylan songs, Red on Blonde, recorded in Nashville with Jerry Douglas, Charlie Cushman and Mark Schatz. Other sessions from the period include albums by Skip Gorman, the Austin Lounge Lizards and the Bad Livers, and Danny Barnes’s Things I Done Wrong (2001).

His duo with Orville Johnson released Kings of Mongrel Folk in 1996 and Still Going Strong in 2002. Graham’s own albums include Inner Life (1998), Southern Old-Time Harmonica (2000) and Thought I Heard It Blow (2001), a duet record with Tom Sauber. He has performed at the Newport Folk Festival, on A Prairie Home Companion and at London’s Festival Hall, and the Kings of Mongrel Folk were still performing in 2020.