LEGACY
THE ROOTS THAT SHAPED MY SOUND
Music didn't begin with me.
It began with the people who taught me how to listen.
My Father–
DOUG MIDGLEY
My dad was a singer-songwriter who wrote with heart, humor, vulnerability, and a grounded truth that landed like both teacher and friend.
Cancer reshaped his life, our family’s life, and eventually his voice.
But even as his body changed, Music never left him.
And he never left Music.
When his vocal cords became paralyzed from an experimental treatment, he kept playing anyway.
He taught me, without ever saying it outright, that the soul of a musician doesn’t live in the condition of the body — it lives in the willingness to keep creating.
He died when I was ten.
He was thirty-nine.
And while losing him shaped me, so did everything he left behind.
His Hummingbird guitar — the one that inspired my song Hummingbird.
His anthology of songs — humor-filled, heart-filled, profoundly human.
And the invisible thread that runs through my music to this day.
In the bridge of Reflections, I sing:
Time won’t define your proximity in my mind.
All it takes is a memory, and suddenly you’re right here with me.
That’s exactly how it feels.
My mission — the one that fuels everything I create — is to carry forward what he gave me:
the reverence, the honesty, the playfulness, the courage, and the knowing that Music is bigger than any one lifetime.
Music in Nature
Music arrived as part of the environment — something that belonged wherever we were.
One of the most defining moments of my life happened at Hog Ranch Radio during the Strawberry Music Festival in Yosemite — a place that meant everything to my dad.
He brought me onstage with him.
By then, his vocal cords were paralyzed, so he introduced me in a hoarse, breathy whisper.
Then he picked up his guitar — his Hummingbird — and played.
I sang a kid’s version of his song Beer, rewritten as Root Beer because… kid.
We got a standing ovation.
Not because it was polished.
But because two generations of music were sharing the same moment — one voice fading, one just beginning — held by everything around us.
I didn’t know it then,
but that was the night Music stopped being something I admired
and became something I belonged to.
I have the recording.
The Instrument Lineage
Every instrument in my life carries a story–
a lineage of hands, breath, strings, and moments.
The first instrument I ever felt connected to.
The one my dad played behind me at Hog Ranch Radio.
The one whose songs taught me how to listen.
🎸
Jazz wasn’t just a genre in our family — it was a lifeline.
My grandfather’s trumpet tone shaped the way I phrase melodies
and helped me understand the power of breath in music.
🎺
Earth energy. Mountain energy.
Rhythm that feels like home.
He taught me how to play with joy, not perfection.
🪕
The only instrument in my life that doesn’t come from someone else.
This is where I meet myself.
Where I learn who I am musically, beyond the lineage I carry.
🎹
Music as Connection
My relationship with my dad didn’t end when he died.
It changed shape.
His songs became guides I can return to.
They carry his humor, his timing, his way of seeing the world.
When I was a teenager, I recorded myself singing an octave above him on a song he wrote called On & On.
It was the first time I found my place in his musical world after he died.
Years later, Love Is For Giving marked a different kind of arrival.
With the help of professional musicians, I brought one of his songs — one he wrote, sang, and played guitar on — into fuller form.
Our voices meet again.
This time with more intention.
A way of staying close.
Music is how connection continues in my heart.
Not by holding on,
but by listening and playing along.
Music through Time
Jazz was the soundtrack of my childhood.
My grandfather played the trumpet by ear.
The sound of it filled the house
with the scent of my grandmother’s walnut chocolate chip cookies.
Summer.
Sound and sweetness sharing the same space.
There was no separation between music and life.
It simply belonged to the journey.
That’s where I learned that music isn’t something you do.
It’s something you live alongside.
That understanding traveled through my grandfather’s trumpet,
my father’s guitar,
my uncle’s banjo,
and eventually into my own hands and voice.
Not as inheritance.
But as a way of listening
that keeps relationships intact —
even as time changes their form.