Seasick Steve

Seasick Steve
Seasick Steve at The Big Chill 2006
Background information
Birth name	Steven Gene Wold
Born	1940/1941 (age 75–76) Oakland, California, U.S.
Genres	Country blues blues blues rock
Occupation(s)	Musician songwriter
Instruments	Vocals guitar diddley bow stomp box banjo
Labels	Caroline International Atlantic Warner Bros. Bronzerat Third Man Dead Skunk
Associated acts	The Level Devils Modest Mouse Jack White John Paul Jones
Website	seasicksteve.com
Notable instruments
Three-String Trance Wonder

Steven Gene Wold (born 1940/1941), commonly known as Seasick Steve, is an American blues musician. He plays mostly personalized guitars, and sings, usually about his early life doing casual work.

Wold was born in Oakland, California. When he was four years old, his parents split up. His father played boogie-woogie piano and Wold tried to learn when he was five or six, without success. At the age of eight, he was taught to play the guitar by K. C. Douglas, who worked at his grandfather's garage, and later realised that he had been taught the blues. Douglas wrote the song "Mercury Blues" and had played with Tommy Johnson in the early 1940s. In 2000 Wold gave his age as 50, and his surname has also been provided as "Leach."

Wold left home at 13 to avoid abuse at the hands of his stepfather, and lived rough and on the road in Tennessee, Mississippi and elsewhere, until 1973. He would travel long distances by hopping freight trains, looking for work as a farm laborer or in other seasonal jobs, often living as a hobo. At various times, Wold worked at a carnival, as a cowboy and as a migrant worker. Wold described this time of his life by saying "Hobos are people who move around looking for work, tramps are people who move around but don't look for work, and bums are people who don't move and don't work. I've been all three."

In the 1960s, Wold started touring and performing with fellow blues musicians, and had friends in the music scene including Joni Mitchell. He spent time living in San Francisco. Since then, he has worked, on and off, as a session musician and studio engineer. In the late 1980s, while living in Olympia, near Seattle, he worked with many indie label artists. In the 1990s he continued to work as a recording engineer and producer, producing several releases by Modest Mouse including their 1996 debut album This Is a Long Drive for Someone with Nothing to Think About.