User:Terry Groff

From The Black Vault Encyclopedia Project

Terry Groff - A Brief Musical Biography
Pseudonyms - Herbert Edgar Wolfe (Composer), Terry Montgomery (Bassist)

Born December 4th, 1951 in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma

Living most of his early life in Tulsa, Oklahoma. he began playing guitar in 1961 due to his Father being an amateur musician and his mother a church pianist/organist. He is totally self taught with no formal musical education. In some ways he blames this on his 6th grade music teacher Mrs. Brown. He remembers in that year that he made A's on all his tests and did all of his homework yet at the end of the first semester he received only a C on his report card. He asked Mrs. Brown why and she said something like "Oh, I don't think you tried hard enough". Well, his thought then was why try at all and told her that since she thought he wasn't trying hard enough, after all he did, he decided not to join the school band that she had been coaxing him to join. He didn't really need coaxing as he had intended to join anyway, until he received the lower grade than he deserved.

During the mid 1960s through the mid 1970's he played in various Rock bands. One band called 'Family Tree' was based in Tulsa but traveled a lot during the early 1970's mostly playing in Texas, Arkansas and Mississippi. Their repertoire featured some of the more melodic instrumentation of The Moody Blues, King Crimson and Pink Floyd avoiding most of the 'heavier' forms of music. It was through these bands that he developed an interest in musical composition. They began writing their own material which was a little 'out-of-the-norm' for most people but they didn't seem to care. They had their own little Rock Opera called 'The Astral Travels Of Starworm' with lyrics written by their good friend Terry Funk. Later Funk wrote a long poem called 'He-Wolf, She-Wolf'. After he read the poem he sat up all night and wrote music for it. The song 'He-Wolf' is where he came up with his pseudonym 'Herbert Edgar Wolfe'

In 1973 the band packed up everything and moved to Seattle, Washington at the urging Mr. Funk. He doesn't know if that was a good idea in retrospect. Because of the depressed economy at the time it was difficult to find gigs. They dropped their rock format and began playing jazz under the name 'The Nyghtgalan Quintet'. This was good for him in that it got him to start examining musical structure again. He had to learn to read Charts and chord diagrams and as a result he wanted to learn all he could about chord forms and how they are used

After a twelve year hiatus from the music business and a failed marriage he purchased another guitar and began visiting various blues jams in the Dallas area. Noticing that there were an extremely large number of very talented guitarists he decided to switch to the Bass guitar just so he could get work. After some coaxing, he convinced Brian 'Hashbrown' Calway to hire him as the house bassist at the long running Schooner's Blues jam. During the years from 1990 through 2004 they hosted in excess of 2000 blues jams. At one time they were doing 4 jams per week plus hosting other jams about once per month. That totals out to almost 250 per year and these did not include regular performances.

Through all this he became a closet composer. He purchased a copy of Sibelius Scorewriting Software which has greatly simplified his work. In 1999 he released a self-published CD on MP3.com called "He-Wolf, She-Wolf" which was a mixture of some of the music he wrote for the Funk poem plus other compositions. He released it under the 'Electronic Classical' genre since it was entirely composed and recorded on his home computer using Cakewalk Pro Audio 9. At one point it was the best selling Classical CD on MP3.com but that didn't last.

In early 2005 he was approached by Rick Phillips (actor/stuntman Walker Texas Ranger, Home Improvement) to write the music for his low budget film called 'Bobby Speaking'. The movie has since been completed but alas is frankly not that good but it was a nice first attempt. The music on the other hand has had a lot of positive comments. You can listen to some of the songs by visiting his website at http://terrygroff.com/music

Terry has been a member of The American Society Of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) since 2001.

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