Stuff About Me

Well,I typed a lot of this stuff up last week, but apparently Blogger doesn't save drafts as long as I thought so I'll have to start this from scratch. This week I just want to offer up a summary of my life so far, which will hopefully give you a pretty good idea of who I am and where I'm coming from.

I grew up in the small town of Spiro, Oklahoma, just across the state line from Fort Smith, Arkansas. I was raised in a Christian family, and we attended Spiro First United Methodist Church. I was baptized at 15 in Spiro Lake (which is basically a large and very dirty pond that made it difficult to imagine the baptism as a symbol of cleansing).

My grandfather, Joe Ross, taught agriculture at Spiro High School, where my grandmother worked as a secretary. They are originally from near Mena, Arkansas (Cove, pop. 383, and Gillham, pop. 188). My mother worked at a pre-school in town, and my father worked for a long-distance telephone company called LDDS (which became LDDS Worldcom, which became Worldcom, which became MCI Worldcom, which apparently did something bad. I assure you it was no fault of his). My dad's mother worked as a nurse in Fort Smith and his father worked for Bell Labs and Lucent Technology in New Jersey. They are originally from Greenup, Illinois, and Upper Sandusky, Ohio.

I have a younger sister named Melanie who is a cheerleader at Carl Albert State College in Poteau, Oklahoma. Most of the rest of my family also reside in Spiro. I lived in Spiro my whole life, minus the four years I spent in Fayetteville studying at the UofA. I also moved back to Spiro for two years after finishing college. Currently, I am living in Fayetteville and working as a graduate assistant at the UofA while I pursue a Master's degree in Mathematics. I teach two sections of College Algebra in addition to the classes that I am taking, and I drive back to Fort Smith in the weekends for the Ignite service.

MUSIC

I didn't really start becoming interested in music until I bought my first guitar when I was seventeen years old. I'm pretty sure that I just bought it because some of the popular kids in the grade ahead of me had guitars, and I wanted to be cool. Once I started playing and learning things, however, I was hooked. I immediately developed an obsession with the guitar. I think that God had a plan to use music and the guitar in my life in a big way. See, I was a really shy and introverted kid. I'm pretty sure there were people in my life growing up who weren't sure that I even knew how to talk. I mean, I had quite a few friends, and I played sports and participated in other school activities. But I just wasn't one to speak up in public, and I was definitely scared to be put on the spot. Those kinds of tendencies, however, aren't really in line with the life of a musician. When people find out that you can play the guitar, they want to hear you play, right then, right in front of them, no excuses. I used to be terrified to play the guitar in front of people (I still am to a certain extent). There's a technique in guitar called vibrato, where you gently shake your left hand as your playing a note to give it a sort of "wavy" effect. Well, I'm pretty sure that I was the master of this technique whenever I played in public because my hands would naturally be shaking so much. So even though I hated the idea of playing music in front of people, it always seemed like there was someone asking me to do it. In fact, I would say that most of the musical endeavors in my life, have been the result of someone telling me that they wanted me to do something that I was convinced I couldn't do. This was definitely the case with my first "big" public performance. Every year, our high school held an event called the Mr. SHS contest. It was set up just like a beauty pageant for guys (no swimsuit portion thankfully). Everyone looked forward to the event though because it took up about 4 hours of class time, and all the guys used the talent section to do a goofy skit or just try to be funny. I had no desire to do either of those things, therefor I never volunteered to be a part of the contest. That, however, didn't stop my Ag teacher, Roy Cox, from volunteering me. He needed someone to represent the FFA in the contest, someone said I could play guitar, he wrote my name down, I begged, he laughed. I was in the contest. I knew that I couldn't pull off anything silly or funny, so I got to work figuring out a cool routine to do on the guitar. I think the final song list ended up being the Top Gun theme, some two-hand tapping from Eruption by Van Halen, a gimmick that involved me playing the guitar behind my head, and a solo guitar rendition of the school song (you might look at that song list and think that I went to high school in the 80's. I did not. This was the late 90's. I was a dork). I was extremely nervous before the contest, but I made it through. At some points people were cheering so loud that I couldn't really hear what I was playing. It was an amazing feeling, but what's more is that I was able to get up there and do something that I thought I couldn't do. I had a lot more self-confidence after that performance, but I still had a long way to go.

more next week,
Scott