Richard OneHum Tillinghast
Richard Tillinghast is the poet son of a family of scholars, adventures, and free lovers of life.
He was born in Cajun country, south Louisiana, home of gumbo and voodoo, and was raised in the red-dirt town of Clemson, SC. His father taught English and poetry at the local college. At age twelve his brother showed him four chords on the guitar and he began writing songs soon after.
Moon shining and banjo picking were part of his growing up, as the granite Appalachian Mountains were a stones throw from his front step. James Dickey, author of Deliverance, was a family friend and many wild river adventures were dreamed up at the dinner table.
He attended Winthrop College on a baseball scholarship, but left after one year to study anthropology in England. After a term at Brighton Polytechnic, he caught a ferry across the English Channel to France and proverbially never looked back.
The next seven years were passed hitch-hiking and motorcycling across Europe, Africa, and the US, writing and playing songs along the way. In this period he worked as a horse wrangler, a potter, a door-to-door salesman, a salad bar inspector, and a musician.
He returned to his South Carolina roots in time and teamed up with longtime friend Jennifer Goree to form Blue Tattoo, a progressive ‘new folk’ duo. BT toured the southeast for several years and released one cassette, which cannot be found anywhere at this point. “A haunting blend of vocals, largely unadorned, and authentic” (Edge Magazine, SC, 1995). Incidentally, Jennifer Goree went on to record five successful albums, the last two produced by Kevin Moloney (U2 and Sinead O’Conner's producer).
Shortly after the Blue Tattoo release, Tillinghast recorded his first solo album, “Men and Their Machines.” Southeastern music critic Dave Horner wrote, “He is a poet, he has traveled with his senses open and attuned and has distilled many thoughts, impressions, and feelings into a beautiful, restless volume of verse in song. Tillinghast’s birth signs must be full of air and water, as his songs teem with images of wind, flight, feathers and birds, and with rivers, floods and water…sometimes escape and oblivion” (Creative Loafing SC).
The album was well received but kayaking was the major passion in his life at this point, and Richard decided to leave the music world and travel west to paddle the rivers of the Rockies, California, and the Pacific Northwest. He landed in the Columbia River Gorge, Washington State, and passed six peaceful years kayaking, raft guiding, and circling “further in” with his community.(As Greg Brown sings in his song “Further In”). Public music performance was not what he wanted to pursue and many of his closest friends didn’t even know he played guitar. Trips to Nepal, Thailand, and South America changed his worldview.
Political atrocities contributed to Tillinghast coming out with “OneHum” with Jason Russ in 2005. Many of the songs were his take on a world gone wrong, yet overall the album expresses the joy of a simple, natural existence. OneHum was recorded live, as in one take per song, in Hood River, OR, at Bigfoot’s Cave Studio by Rick Hulett, of Django’s Cadillac. Annie Bloom’s Books and Music wrote, “From the Columbia Gorge comes this talented and eclectic folk duo. Richard sings in a warm, expressive baritone while Jason thumps, taps, slaps, and rattles out an empathetic percussive groove. Reminiscent of folk innovators from Greg Brown to Iron and Wine, Tillinghast and Russ deliver a rich, impressive recording with OneHum and show great promise for what may come next.”
Since then, RT has been traveling and playing music a great deal, both solo and as a member of the band OneHum. He lives in a rich community of musicians and continues to learn from them every day.
-New CD-
Richard is currently finishing a cd with Greenhill Studios in Portland, OR. The studio is sonically large and the cd is sounding great. Intimate fingerpicking with cello, mandolin, percussion, and banjo. It will feature eleven or twelve new originals.