Russ Fitzgerald

The self-described black sheep of a family of classically-trained musicians, Russ Fitzgerald has used songwriting to make sense of life since 1978. His Macon, Georgia cult roots-rock band The Deadbeats was a key act in the mid-1980s Central Georgia music scene. At the time of his solo acoustic debut in 1989, he was described in The Macon Telegraph as "a guitar nut [who] leans toward rockabilly, blues, brilliant folk rock [with] a distinct love of the music of Richard Thompson and The Blasters." In the years since, he has absorbed a dizzying array of musical influences and made them his own while playing venues including dive bars, coffee shops, bookstores, live-streamed guitar pulls, festivals and songwriter showcases. When asked to describe his music, he said, “I’ve been grappling with that question since I started. I think of it as ‘Bare-Knuckle Acoustic Trans-Atlantic Americana,’ but really it’s all about trying to write songs that move people, and preferably with a song that you can’t pin down which decade it comes from.”