Music
The best kept secret in music
Press
AMANDA FOX BENEFIT 2003
Last Day Saloon, Santa Rosa, Calif.
Ron Hacker and the Hacksaws absolutely killed the crowd from the first note. Lots of people got the point. In a time when lots of blues acts sound somewhat the same Ron has gone back to the root and plays the real old blues with power and drive. Rons collection of stone blues guitars sounds so good when Ron plays them, and so down home. And the mordant way he has of singing combined with the flashing hard slide guitar drives the songs right home to you. Sonoma County fans around me in the audience were asking about Ron, I told them what I new about his great CD "Burnin". Ronnie Smith showed me again why he's my favorite drummer; rock solid simplicity! Combined with the advanced way Artis Joyce plays the bass the Hacksaws have a rhythm drive of spine-shaking power. - Sonoma Tunes
Discography
See website www.ronhacker.com
Backdoor Man, 2000
Burnin, 2002
Photos
Feeling a bit camera shy
Bio
"The first time I got the blues, I mean really got the blues, was in 1956. A friend and I got caught breaking into parking meters. I was eleven - he was twelve. Off we went to the juvenile center. The counselors in the center were young Afro-Americans in their twenties and they loved their music, like young dudes do. In '56 their music was Elmore James, Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, B.B. King, Jimmy Reed. I fell in love with the music and it's been a part of my life since then. As I've gotten older I've tried to concentrate more on playing the Blues than living them."
After teaching himself to play guitar, Ron met the late Yank Rachell, famous partner of Sleepy John Estes. Yank trained Ron on the finer points of Delta Blues, and they became life-long friends in the process.
The actor Peter Coyote helped Ron get his first gig in San Francisco at a neighborhood coffee shop. It wasn't long before Ron put together the Hacksaws and was tearing it up in clubs all over the Bay Area.
"I see what I do with the Blues as no different then what Elmore James, Howlin' Wolf, and Muddy Waters did when they took the old Blues they had been playing on their back porches in the Delta and move to town. When the Bluesmen first came up from the South they brought their music with them, but the big cities in the north, St. Louis, Chicago, Detroit, and New York were fast and loud. So they electrified their guitars, turned them up, and played them old time Blues rough and raw. That's what we do."
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