| Mark Ambrose |
| "Mark Ambrose, the man who knows everyone” By Jimmy Ash, Hill Country Sun Mark Ambrose is one of those people you feel like you’ve known all your life, like you grew up next door to him. That may have something to do with his success, or it may just be his talent, which is prodigious. It’s hard to tell. Mark is a cowboy from Chicago. Yeah, that’s right, there are no cowboys from Chicago. Nonetheless, he is. He went to a camp in Oregon, Illinois, where he learned to ride horses and developed a taste for country music. He quickly worked his way into working at the camp. The rest of his boyhood was spent moving back and forth between the country and the city, but it was the country that claimed his heart. The country and the music. “I wanted to play the drums, but my dad wouldn’t let me,” he laughs. “I still want to play the drums.” Then, riding his bike past a music store one day, he noticed the guitars hanging on the wall of the shop. “I instinctively knew I could play guitar so I went home and talked my dad into buying me one,” he says. “I went home and wrote a song that night.” Mark was nine years old. He kept writing songs for years without making much progress. Then, when he was 20, he met bluegrass legend, Bill Monroe. “I had gone to this concert he was giving in Indiana.” Mark remembers. “After the show he came out to sign autographs. He was just standing there with nobody talking to him, so I went up to him and I asked, ‘Mr. Monroe, how do you write a song?’ and he said, ‘Don’t worry about people understanding what you’re saying. Just tell them what you feel and they’ll understand it.’ So I went home and wrote All I Need Is You. It was a bluegrass song after Bill Monroe’s style. That song came fast.” It wasn’t all Bill Monroe’s inspiration. Mark had just fallen in love. A few months later, as fate would have it, Monroe came to Chicago to play at the Navy Pier. Taking his guitar with him, mark once again made his way into the maestro’s presence and asked if he could play his song for him. Monroe told him to come backstage after the show. “There were like 40 people in the dressing room, and all of the Bluegrass Boys in their light shirts and white cowboy hats,” Mark smiles. “All of a sudden, in the middle of this whole scene, Bill Monroe stops the whole room and says, ‘You got that song?’ and I said ‘Yes, sir.’ So I unpack my guitar and put it on and, man, I’m 5-foot-8 and he looks about seven feet tall and he steps up about six inches from my face and he said, ‘OK, play that song.’ And I sang All I Need Is You and by the second chorus he was singing harmony on it. The whole room shut up. He said, ‘Now that’s a good song. I’ve got my Bill Monroe Publishing Company in Nashville and you get down there and get going,’ and like a dummy I listened to him and I grabbed my girlfriend and my guitar and a boom box and we rolled to Nashville.” In Nashville, Mark met other stars like Billy Joe Shaver who told him about Kerrville and Texas. And he met Townes van Zandt at the Rock and Roll Motel and began opening for him at various venues and just hanging out with him. “Townes was just a real sweet guy and a genuine friend,” Mark grins. “I can’t say enough about him and I’ll probably never stop talking about him, but I guess it wears people out. They’re telling me to stop talking about him. And he said the same thing. We were doing a TV show and I said I wanted to wear one of his T-shirts. He said, ‘No-don’t wear a Townes van Zandt T-shirt. You need to get your won little thing together, get your ownself cooking.’ And sometimes maybe talking about our relationship takes away from what I’m doing but I’m not him at all. The cool thing is we did end up meeting and we became friends. We shared a sense of humor. He cracked me up all the time.” There is no doubt that Mark is his own man. Once he starts singing, his music shapes his persona and if he was ever in the shadow of anyone he quickly leaves it behind. His second album, Shadow on the Moon produced by Scrappy Jud Newcomb, was released last year. He is presently working on a third in Nashville with some other friends, Gillian Welch and David Rawlings at their studio, the old RCA Studio B where Patsy Cline, the Everly Brothers and Elvis cut their albums. “It’s going to turn out great,” he says with a wide smile. “You should hear that studio and those guys. Man, this is going to be a great album. This is going to be incredible. Shadow on the Moon is a great album. Two great albums back to back, it’s going to be great. What I’m saying is that if I’m lucky I could die young.” He’s smiling. It could be a joke. |