The story below is from our November/December 2022 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you!
A songwriter, performer and major player in folk music, Greg Trafidlo has lived it fully.
Greg Trafidlo still plays living rooms and tiny coffee houses because folk musicians rarely get too big for their britches.
He is one of Roanoke’s best-known musicians and he has written and performed the past 37 years—after a successful career in advertising—one gig at a time, however large or small. He has appeared on more than 90 recordings (six with his most recent group Trifokal), produced 45 and even performed for Congress at one point.
While he has played Wrigley Field in Chicago, the Bluebird Café and the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, he was also the first musician to appear at Roanoke’s Third Street Coffee House where crowds in double figures are nice.
Dan Smith
Greg Trafidlo at the Third Street Coffee House.
Trafidlo, who is 76, has backed up the Kingston Trio and Brothers Four, opened for Emmylou Harris, John Hartford, played with Bill Monroe, Janis Ian, Kathy Mattea, and Billy Ed Wheeler, performed in the play “Stonewall Country” in Lexington and the “Cotton Patch Gospel” at Mill Mountain Theatre. He played bluegrass for 10 years, some with the Bass Mountain Boys. He is past president of the Southwest Virginia Songwriters Association and a charter member of the International Folk Alliance. He has played in Ireland, Mexico, China and Canada.
Trafidlo is not tied to a genre, playing mostly folk, but mixing in country, pop, bluegrass and Americana. He writes a lot of his music and is best known recently for his contemporary trio, Trifokal, with his ex-wife Laura Pole and Neal Phillips.
The resume is thick, full and impressive including a Vietnam era stint in the Air Force in security policing, art school in Chicago, a bachelor’s degree in journalism at Southern Illinois University (he is a native of a small suburban town, Downers Grove, Illinois) and graduate work in ethnomusicology.
He showed up in Roanoke initially in 1981 (he had been with the Greater Chicago Bluegrass Band, which once opened for Lester Flatt) to work as a writer/producer for a small ad agency. He freelanced and worked at the legendary Media Works winding up as a writer producer at WSET-TV before he decided to go full-time pro as a musician. “I wanted to give myself a year,” he says. During that year, he won the Louisville Songwriting Competition grand prize and was off.
“It was mostly part-time stuff.” It was a matter, he says, “of finding out where I fit in the food chain.” Playing with folk legend Tom Paxton, who became a close friend, helped him find that food chain spot, especially with his songwriting.
He met his ex-wife, Laura Pole in the late 1980s and wound up backing her up at the Third Street Coffee House. Their “common vision” held them together for several years, he says, and keeps them together as part of Trifokal. His wife since 2003 is Judy Larson, who was his high school sweetheart. “The first song I recorded on a 45 rpm was for her,” he says.
Folk music—sometimes called “Americana”—has always floated around the edges of popularity with a big impact in the early 1960s. It has always been the music of the people, regardless of where those people live and work. It tells stories, records histories, creates communities.
That’s where Trafidlo lives professionally. His lyrics can be fall-down funny at one moment and mourning the loss of a loved one the next. They can be political or melancholy, foot-stomping or lullaby.
It’s all there and whether it is being performed in a coffee house, a living room, or a major auditorium, it remains intimate and meaningful.
The story below is from our November/December 2022 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you!