Grant Bentley

The son of an architect and a country girl from the oil fields near Bakersfield, CA, Grant first picked up a guitar at age eleven. It was left in the items that his grandfather owned before he passed away of a heart attack in the mid 1960s. Grant took guitar lessons that featured the fingerpicking styles of Mississippi John Hurt and Doc Watson combined with the repertoire of Bob Dylan and Peter, Paul and Mary. He joined his younger brother Bill in forming the rock band "Jasmine" in high school then went off to college at UC Berkeley in 1970. With influences like the Beatles, James Taylor and Jackson Browne, Grant felt at home with the singer/songwriter role as it became known. It initially took the break-up of his first marriage in 1986 to drive his creative self-expression and, with the help of his younger brother, by now an established record producer, to record tracks of his songs.