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Marjorie Thompson has worked hard and excelled at three careers, any one of which would cause many to bow under the pressure.
Originally from New York City, she took up the guitar in the mid-1960's. She received a $16 department store guitar she received at age 10. Taught by local teens who wore the cool hippie look and forayed into the jungle of Greenwich Village, she became a passionate and fairly adept young player, in the traditional styles of the Blues artists of the 20s and 30s, as well as New York street singer Rev. Gary Davis and the rediscovered Mississippi John Hurt.
After a year of determined and constant playing, she was rewarded with a Guild F-30, similar to John Hurt's, which she still owns. By age 12, Marjorie could pick a solid alternating thumb groove with a detailed melody line, no mean feat even for older, more experienced players. And she loved it.
At the same time, she discovered a strong attraction for science, borne of a precollege program in 1969 that galvanized her passion for biology by the age of 15.
Life's paths brought college and graduate school, and the pursuit of studies at Brown University during the 1970s. In 1974, Marjorie received a degree in Biochemistry, followed by a PhD in Biology in 1979. The first of her seven children was born in 1980.
Beginning in 1983 -- and still going strong -- she has been part of the biology faculty and deanery at Brown, doing what she also loves: teaching and advising students.
Each New Year's, she would resolve to learn "Hesitation Blues" (a Rev. Gary Davis piece) the way Jorma played it so famously.
Something special and important happened in 1999. Jorma Kaukonen himself had opened a guitar camp in rural southeastern Ohio. The Fur Peace Ranch Guitar Camp was offering weekend workshops. "I was terrified, but wrote the deposit check immediately."
The first visit to the camp in August 1999 returned her musical pursuits to the fore. She rediscovered the passion and desire to play that she had experienced as a teenager. She returned repeatedly to the camp in the ensuing year -- she still holds the record for the most-frequent student -- to study with Jorma, now her master teacher and good friend. "Hesitation Blues" was comfortable at last, but she still thought of herself as a guitar hobbyist.
Marjorie had played a lot of guitar over 35 years, but had never written a song. In the summer of 2001, she heard songs that were demanding to be written -- the Rev. Gary Davis used to say that songs were "revealed" to him, and the muse now was so strong she understood what he had meant. By November of that year she had written 40 songs. There are over 100 now).
The diminutive Marjorie, with a full time academic job and a full house -- to say nothing of stage fright -- became her own booking agent and producer. A demo CD opened the door to a year's worth of bookings -- 92 the first year out.
Since then, she has recorded four studio albums of her songs with a proper producer and engineer, and her career as a country blues artist has continued to grow, with neither end nor plateau in sight. More recently, she has served as Jorma Kaukonen's teaching assistant at Fur Peace Ranch. In 2007 she appeared in the Fur Peace Ranch course list as an instructor in her own workshop, "Songcrafting and Country Blues Essentials," which was quickly filled.
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