If Robbie Fulks had been lucky, he would have been born forty years earlier. That way he could have enjoyed the hey-day of honky-tonk artists like Johnny Paycheck, Hank Williams, and George Jones. Unfortunately, a child of the '70s, he was forced to cut his teeth on Conway Twitty, Ronnie Milsap, and the rest of the mass-produced Nashville pap. It was hardly a fair bargain, but he's since come to terms with his lackluster luck, releasing a late 2005 album that combines his childhood memories with the best of his record collection.




Born in Pennsylvania but raised in Virginia and North Carolina, Fulks' future was probably always one of a fringe country star. Given a banjo at seven and adept at the fiddle by eleven, by the time Fulks dropped out of Columbia on a scholarship he had decided that guitar was the way to go. Following the girl who was carrying his child, he headed to Chicago, where he found work as a paralegal, proofreader, actor, and, fortunately, a teacher of folk music at the Old Town School of Folk Music (a place worth a second mention; check it out online at http://www.oldtownschool.org/).

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