Excerpts From Time
Leroy Preston was born in Vermont and raised on a small dairy farm in the town of Strafford.
He later went to high school in Barre, VT when the family moved there and once graduated, he attended Northeastern University in Boston.
His early influences in music were artists heard on the radio like Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis, Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, and country artists including Hank Snow, Ernest Tubb and Dick Curless. He was part of a high school rock band in Barre, called the VIPs, which included Vermont guitar legend Kip Meaker.
Later, while attending Northeastern a friend introduced him to fellow musicians Ray Benson and Lucky Oceans. The trio quickly made a musical bond that soon evolved into the popular country swing group Asleep at the Wheel.
Some 50+ years later, Asleep at the Wheel’s history and music is well documented and ongoing. Leroy was the band’s primary songwriter in those early years and his songs and songs cowritten, drew their own level of acclaim for a stylistic approach revealing influences from Hank Williams, Bob Wills and R&B icons Amos Milburn and Wynonie Harris. Leroy’s songs from this era are available to hear within many collections of Asleep at the Wheel music distributed worldwide.
In the early 1980’s Leroy left Asleep at the Wheel and formed a new group out of Austin called Whiskey Drinkin’ Music, who toured the Southwest regionally for a little over two years. The band did a great deal of Leroy’s original material and won a Texas Music Award for Best Touring Band. It was during this time that Rosanne cash cut Leroy’s song My Baby Thinks He’s a Train which went to number 1 on the Billboard Magazine’s Country charts. Cash followed up this success with another of Leroy’s songs, one titled I Wonder which also made the top 10 on the charts.
After Whiskey Drinkin’ Music disbanded, Leroy eventually moved back to Vermont and worked with family and friends in the building trades. He was not doing a lot of music when he got a call from his publishing company who were opening a new office in Nashville. That led to talks with Garry Velletri who was to direct this new venture as the Nashville Bug Music publishing company. Leroy was enlisted and signed on to become a company staff writer for Bug. He would spend the next 13 years writing songs and working out of Nashville with the company.
While there he wrote or co-wrote songs for: kd Lang, Lee Roy Parnell, Los Lobos, (with Cesar Rosas), Robert Earl Keen, Rosie Flores, Marshall Crenshaw, Bob Welch, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band (w/Jimmie Fadden), Dennis Locorriere, Hank DeVito, Melba Montgomery, Bill Kirchen, Bill Morrissey, The Cate Brothers Band, Jeanne Smith Durocher, Dave Durocher, Blackie Farrell, Roy Hurd, Martin Cowart, Rick Norcross, the Starline Rhythm Boys and many other unnamed but never undervalued cohorts.
By the late 1990’s Leroy’s Nashville tenure was coming to a close and he decided to return to Vermont once more. He now lives with his wife Jan in Addison County in an old 1830’s brick house with good water and a great view, where he continues writing songs and playing guitar. He is satisfied that the new I Got Here from There the Vermont Sessions project is his best to date.
Enjoy!