Grammy winner returns to Chasco
Bill Miller and his cedar flute will be on stage March 3, Native American Night, and it will be another Grammy first for the festival.
By BARBARA L. FREDRICKSEN
Published February 15, 2005
On Sunday, Mohican Indian Bill Miller won a Grammy Award for his latest album, Cedar Dream Songs, an instrumental featuring him playing the cedar flute.
On March 3, Miller will be on stage in Sims Park as the headliner for the opening night of the Chasco Fiesta on Native American Night.
This will be the first time that Chasco has featured a performer who has won a Grammy Award for a solo recording. In 2002, Chasco Country Concert headliner Joe Diffie had had two tracks on the 1998 Grammy Award-winning album, Tribute to Tradition , for "Best Country Collaboration with Vocals," an album featuring 14 tracks by 13 different performers. Previous Chasco performer Lonestar has been nominated for Grammys six times.
"We're really lucky to hit it this way," said Pete Altman, who is in charge of Chasco's Native American Night and was instrumental in establishing Native American Night in 2003. Miller was featured performer on that night, too.
Miller won in the "Best Native American Music Album, vocal or instrumental" category. His March 3 performance will be at 7:30 p.m. The evening will also have American Indian dancers and other musicians in full regalia.
Cedar Dream Songs is the 12th album Miller has recorded since 1993. In 2000, his album Ghost Dance won five Native American Music Awards, including Artist of the Year, Album of the Year and Songwriter of the Year.
Miller started out in music at age 5, when he was living on the Stockbridge-Munsee Reservation in northern Wisconsin.
"There was woods, trout and a Zenith radio that picked up AM stations cross the country," Miller once told an interviewer. He grew up listening to Barbra Streisand, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, B.B. King, Jimi Hendrix and Bob Dylan. He got his first guitar at age 12 and later joined a teen rock band.
Before long, though, he traded his electric guitar for an acoustic one and took up the American Indian wooden flute. After attending a Pete Seegar concert while he was studying art at the Layton School of Art and Design in Milwaukee, he moved to Nashville and became a singer/songwriter. He wrote for Kim Carnes and Nancy Griffith, among others, and shared the stage with Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder, the BoDeans and Arlo Guthrie.
His big break came when he was asked to open for Tori Amos on the Under the Pink tour in 1994, after he had issued his first CD the previous year, The Red Road . Entertainment Weekly compared his guitar and harmonica playing on his debut release to that of Neil Young.
Miller's previous albums have been blends of American Indian and western folk/blues vocals and instrumentals. His Grammy winner is flute, drum, guitar, keyboard and other instruments.
Besides composing, playing, performing and producing music, Miller is also a serious painter. He maintains an art studio in his Nashville home and has had his work shown and sold in several U.S. galleries. He is also an ardent environmentalist.
Samples of Miller's music from Cedar Dream Songs can be found on amazon.com.