Clever, insightful and irreverent, Robbie Fulks is a founding father of the alt-country scene and an icon in roots music. One of the most gifted songwriters of his generation and deeply rooted in the musical traditions that built an entire genre, Fulks’s adventurous spirit and eclectic persona have defined a critically-acclaimed 30-year career that has included 15 solo albums, two Grammy® nominations, and a mountain of respect from some of the industry’s most revered personnel.
Fulks was born in York, Pennsylvania, and grew up in a half-dozen small towns in southeast Pennsylvania, the North Carolina Piedmont, and the Blue Ridge area of Virginia. He learned guitar from his dad, banjo from the Earl Scruggs instruction book, and songwriting by a trial-and-error process that is still going on. He attended Columbia College in New York City in 1980 and dropped out in 1982 to focus on the Greenwich Village songwriter scene. He moved to Chicago in the mid 1980s, joining Greg Cahill’s bluegrass outfit Special Consensus and teaching at the Old Town School of Folk Music. After a stint as a Music Row songwriter in Nashville in the 1990s, he embarked on a solo career with the Chicago-based indie Bloodshot Records and later, Geffen and Yep Roc, releasing a string of albums that helped to define the “alternative country” movement. His 2016 release UPLAND STORIES garnered Grammy® nominations for Best Folk Album and Best American Roots Song for the track “Alabama At Night.” While Fulks’s aversion to genre constraints and conventions has sometimes made him hard to pigeonhole, American country music, in the widest sense, is his home base — the country of Doc Watson, Bill Monroe, Merle Haggard, Bobby Charles, and Mississippi John Hurt, for example. For the last ten years, he has focused in his writing and performing on homespun tales and acoustic instruments