"It was the summer of my second year in college," he relates, "I got a job as a fire lookout up in Montana, but as it turned out I found myself instead on a crew building back-country trails, alongside a kid from New Jersey who played guitar. In the evening after work he'd take it out and fingerpick the blues and it was magic to me. I come from people who aren't all that musically inclined, so this kid was something. I remember thinking, 'This is it. This I gotta learn.' That fall I bought my first guitar. All these years later it's still magic, but if it'd gone the way I'd planned, if I hadn't ended up on that trail crew, with that kid for that summer, who knows where I'd be. Sometimes you just get lucky."
After college - he graduated with a degree in journalism - Ritchie moved to Seattle and began singing on the streets and in the little cafes near the waterfront around the Pike Street Market. For the next decade he divided his time between winter music in clubs and concert halls around the Pacific Northwest and summers working on trail crews for the forest Service, fighting fires and manning back country lookouts. In 1984 he released his first collection of songs, Not Just Another Pretty Songwriter, to good reviews. Not long after, his music was featured on a best selling regional anthology produced by Seattle radio station KEZX and things began to happen. His concert schedule began taking him further afield and he quickly established a place for himself among the top ranks of songwriter/performers on the national touring scene.
Songwriting awards accumulated. He was a two-time finalist at the Kerrville Folk Festival's New Folk showcases and a headline performer there. He won top honors from the Napa Valley (CA), Sisters (OR) and Jubilee (CO) Folk Festival songwriting competitions. In both 2001 and 2005 he was the only double-showcase songwriter featured at the Walnut Valley Festival's New Artist Showcase in Kansas. Also in 2005 he was one of only a dozen finalists chosen from among more than twelve hundred applicants to showcase his music at the Mountain Stage Newsong Festival in West Virginia.
There have been three more CDs, Changing Of The Guard, Homeground, and his most recent, My Father's Wildest Dream. Meanwhile after seventeen years in the Northwest, Ritchie relocated to the canyon country of southeast Utah. In 2003 he lent advisory support to the newly
There's something at once both familiar and fresh about Ritchie's music, a classic quality rich in roots influences.
"That's not by accident," he confesses, "I love the forms and textures of genre music. Old folk ballads, country blues, swing, ragtime - they're wonderfully durable and I just naturally gravitate to those shapes when I write. They lend a timeless quality to a song, and coupled with the immediacy of a contemporary lyric can make for some very compelling music."
He must be doing something right. Progress reports arrive all the time - not from professional music critics but from ordinary people
with whom his music resonates deeply .
