One of my first “art teachers” was a gentleman I encountered when I was about 14 in my hometown, Columbia, Louisiana. Wooten Morris carved intricate floral designs on walking canes and smoking pipes. He took me under his wing and taught me how to look at a piece of wood and “see” the image residing there that could be released with a bit of “whittling”. In college, I studied Ceramic Sculpture and before my musical career came to dominate my life in the late sixties, I thought I would become a ceramic artist. In the early 1970s, however, I returned to wood carving as my media for sculpture and continue to work in that material today. I am, however, slowly beginning to work in clay again.