Photo: Ken Frasure in the 1980's

Ken Frasure's Artist Bio

While in college Ken played with a band called Hardscuffle in the town of Franklin, Tennessee. Hardscuffle played top forty covers in a variety of venues. Just after college Ken played with the Nashville band Santa Clause. "Everybody in that band was crazy for one reason or another," says Ken. "On a good night we were dynamite and on a bad night we really sucked, but the band was very genuine and if it had stayed together it would have gotten somewhere." The next band was called Trance Mission. It included Davy Lutton, formerly drummer for T Rex, and Connie Kirschbaum, a music school graduate, on bass. This version of Trance Mission played a lot of gigs in the Clarksville area. In the early 1980s Ken met Christie Guillot who had played with the Archies in the sixties. He formed a band with her and Steve Arsenault on drums. This combo toured the Canadian Midwest, playing five hours a night, six nights a week. After several months of this, Ken lost his voice and Christie broke her arm, and the band returned to Nashville and broke up.

Ken began a solo recording career at this time that has not stopped since, despite playing in a number of bands and projects. He put out a series of singles, on vinyl and cassette, that were promoted to college radio, and was able to get significant airplay. Ken had the good fortune to be able to get Billy Cox, former Band of Gypsies bassist, to play with him on a single with Davy Lutton on drums.

As the eighties came to a close, Ken put together a new version of Trance Mission with Kenny Williams and Cedric Harts. They played a few gigs, but were unable to play steadily and this version of the band broke up.

Ken's father suffered a brain stem stroke in 1990, effectively putting an end to his live playing. Ken had to put a lot of time into caring for his father and his father's property until his father, fully conscious but a total quadriplegic, died in late 1994.

The next project Ken put out was an EP on CD, an effort called "Too Many Women". The eponymous song was inspired by a man brought to juvenile court for child support while Ken was working there. He had, at that time, fifteen children by seven women.

"Too Many Women", engineered by Joe Funderburk of Thunder Audio Productions, was the last Ken produced in a regular recording studio. The recording costs were so high that Ken was afraid that he would have to stop recording, but just in the nick of time, the new hard-drive recorder technology became affordable and available. Ken has since produced two more albums, "A Caustic Acoustic" and "Eclectic Electric." Both are available on CDbaby. Ken wrote all the songs, sang all the voices, and played all the instruments for these CDs, including guitar, bass, violin bass, drums, keyboard, djembe, and on one cut, garbage can.