Jeff Daniels, acting like a 60-year-old dad, on stage Sunday at Pochahontas State Park in Virginia.
Did you know actor Jeff Daniels of Chelsea also is a prolific songwriter and musician? We confess we didn't until seeing his tweets this morning about performing Sunday at a Virginia festival with his son's group, the Ben Daniels Band.
The Southeast Michigan-based band, which says it "spans Americana, blues, jazz, and rock," was part of an outdoor Ragtime Carnival at a sate park in Chesterfield, Va.
Daniels calls music "my church." (Twitter photos via Ben Daniels Band)
Hitting the road with his guitar and his boy lets him "drink from the fountain of youth," says Daniels, 60. In addition to doing live shows, Daniels also joins the group in the studio -- as he recently did to record with Keb' Mo.
The film, TV and stage actor, a Chelsea native, founded the Purple Rose Theater there in 1991 and has written 15 plays. He performs with a custom Martin OM acoustic guitar, has written about 400 songs and describes the musical awakening at his website:
In 1976, I bought a Guild D-40 from Herb David’s Guitar Studio in Ann Arbor, Michigan, threw it in the back of my old Buick, and moved to New York City. That guitar led me to a creative outlet, became a solace, my church, a road into the artist I didn’t know existed.
-- Alan Stamm
