Greg Dearth

1980s. He played old-time and bluegrass fiddle with the Hotmud Family, the Hagan Brothers, and the Hutchinson Brothers, and recorded with Bill Lowe. During the early 1970s, he was teaching fiddle at Dayton’s Living Arts Center. He wrote a well-known instrumental, “Empty Pocket Blues,” recorded by the Hutchison Brothers and later made nationally popular by Hot Rize. In later years, he got into other types of music with the Rugcutters, Rhythm In Shoes, and in 2016 is a part of the Dayton group Dave Greer’s Classic Jazz Stompers, where he plays fiddle, clarinet, sax, banjo, and guitar and does the occasional vocal. He is an artist/illustrator whose work has appeared in books and in advertising for Fortune 500 companies. In 2016, he was living in southwestern Ohio and working as a portrait artist as well as doing oil paintings of landscapes and still life. His portrait of one-time bandmate Rick Good appeared on the cover of the June 2013 issue of The Old_Time Herald. He also teaches drawing and oil painting at Rosewood Art Center in Kettering. Dearth drew a wonderful cartoon for the back cover of the Hotmud Family’s live LP on Flying Fish Records which depicted a bar scene showing the conflicting thoughts of the band and various bar patrons.