Artist - Howard Salmon

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Last update: 31/01/12 16:35:49 Account: Artist Pro Gold Location: AMERICA NORTH: USA: California (CA) Signed up: 19 Feb 2011 07:02 PM Members: Genre: Country Influences: Website:

Biography

Howard Salmon was born in Richmond, California on Christmas Day 1958.

His father was just out of the Army and his mother had just graduated high school in Richmond. They later moved the family – including Salmon's sister Bonnie, born in 1960 – to Deadwood, Oregon. “My dad was a logger and powder monkey” Salmon says, and by a young age it was clear he'd inherited his old man's fearlessness. At the age of three, Salmon recalls 'waiting one day near the exit point of a groundwater pipe where I knew snakes liked to crawl, I caught one coming out by the tail and took it into the house, saying “Look,Mommy,' as she proceeded to run out the back door.'

Salmon joined the U.S. Army in 1976 ( he served for a time in Korea).

He picked up his artistry in a church choir while in the Air Force and stationed at Travis Air Force Base in Fairfield, California, in the early 1980's, where his job was a driver. He drove “anything they had”, he says and “I sang in the church with my friends and started to play the guitar.” His subsequent work in the commercial trucking industry would later fuel his original music to a large degree. After starting out in a 1976 cab-over Peterbilt in 1984 with Silva Bros. Trucking, he would go independent as an owner-operator of a Kenworth T600 in 1996, trading in 1999 for a Kenworth W900L he drives to this day.

Naming among his influences George Jones, Alan Jackson and George Strait, Salmon wrote his first song while trucking in the early 1990s... 'Who Would They Look Up To' is an uplifting track written originally for Salmon's niece and nephews but finally recorded more than a decade later, with second graders at Anderson Heights Elementary, Salmon's class in the Trucker Buddy educational program that pairs long-haul drivers with elementary-school classrooms around the USA.

Salmon's appearances on public radio and in other venues after the songs release spurred his musical career forward. Six hundred copies of his début album, “These Trucks Are Made Of Gold” (2009), were shipped to U.S. Troops stationed overseas as part of care packages sent in the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association's 'Truckers for Troops' program.

The music on the record is true country to the core, with accomplished song writing from Salmon and others, including infamous trucker/poet Ron Terry and Al Orkins Jr.

Musically, he says “ I feel the best is yet to come.”