Artists:John Coster

John Coster was born and raised in Katonah, NY. His first musical influences were a local folksinger who was part of the early Greenwich Village scene and a neighbor from Tennessee who played bluegrass banjo and collected recordings of traditional and country music.

John started playing guitar as an eighth grader. In his early teens he occasionally made his way into Manhattan to check out the street scene and hear some of the new singer songwriters like Dylan and recently discovered older artists like Mississippi John Hurt and Doc Watson. These were times of wild expectation and awakening, when songs like Dylan?s "Blowing in the Wind" were stirring up trouble for the establishment.

The summer after he finished high school at the Loomis School in Connecticut, John traveled to Nova Scotia with a friend, fiddler George Dorian; he and George roamed about the Island of Cape Breton, learning and recording some of the powerful Gaelic music there and sometimes playing at house parties. He returned to Cape Breton to visit a Nova Scotian girlfriend after his first year at Harvard, spent more time with some of the area musicians and played rhythm guitar and harmonica at local dance parties that summer.

Over the next couple of years John and George started doing shows with some colorful musicians from the Cornell/ Ithaca area, banjo wizard Walt Koken, harmonica player Marty Lebenson, superior picker Doug Dorschug and others. Out of this matrix a group called The Busted Toe Mudthumpers evolved. Sometimes they teamed up with magician Ricky Jay, recently known for his sell out Broadway performances and acting roles in movies like Boogie Nights and The Heist. Mudthumper history culminated in a tour across Canada and down the West Coast in the summer of ?68. More.