Music has always been an integral of his life.  At the age of ten, he started playing a piano that he found in the back of an old country church his parents attended.  While the adults were in the church service, Jerry was pounding the keys in the back building and making up his own songs because he didn’t know how to play anything else.  At the age of eleven, his musical career took back seat for a year when he lost the tip of his middle finger on his right hand.  After a year in recuperation, Jerry was forced to adapt his fingering style to fit the disability, contributing to his unique personal style of playing.

At sixteen, he started playing guitar and played in his first band called, “Tommy and The Turds.”  Tommy was bandleader and played bass.  Jerry was one of the “Turds.”  They only played a few teen parties.  There were no clubs because the county was dry.  He then quit playing for a few years and got into a roaming mood.

The next few years of the ‘70s found him involved with a record label called “Rubber Dubber Records.”  It was a bootleg label with an interesting concept. (The artists would receive the royalties from bootleg recordings.)  This landed him in California in the L.A. scene.  There he played with several bands that never made any splash because they did cover music.  He always longed to do his original songs, which he continued to write.

When Rubber Dubber was busted by the U.S. Marshals in the summer of ’71, he (luckily not named in any legal matters) moved to Oregon where he had a spiritual awakening that led him to Illinois where he played in a band called “The Path,” which ended in California in “73.  That band gave him a taste of doing his own material, some of which exists on obscure tapes today.

His experiences eventually led him into marriage, kids, and working and living in Central and South America and Mexico working with refugees from earthquakes and wars and the poor   It was while in Honduras, Central America he connected again with the professional music world, but not with his own material.  In the mid eighties, Jerry recorded all the keyboard parts for a double-sided 45 on a Honduran label with singer songwriter Renan Carias.  Both songs charted in the markets of Central and South America and into Southern Mexico.  After Carias received a sour deal with the label, he left for Miami and dropped the project.

“I thought that was my fifteen minutes of fame,” Jerry muses.

Jerry has been back in the U.S. for a few years, living and playing in South Texas’ Rio Grande Valley.  In September of ’97, he moved to Austin, Texas with his two sons in order to expand his musical vision.  He recorded a solo piano project (soon to be reissued) aptly titled, “Jerry Rigged Piano.”  It was first released on cassette through Rodent Ranch Productions, and later on CD.  He began making appearances on the Humble Time radio broadcast and the Austin Music Network TV.  His recordings began to find their way onto airwaves in Europe, as well as South Texas and other U.S. stations

Another CD was released in ‘99 that incorporated guitar and piano and includes two cuts with his band-mates from The Jerry Rigged Band.  His song, “Baila Baila,” climbed to a number four spot on the MP3.com Latin charts several times and continues to enjoy radio play in bilingual areas. 
For the past two years, he has been working and playing with the legendary Spencer Perskin from the old Austin band, Shiva’s Headband.  Spencer plays violin and percussion on a couple of Jerry’s songs and is presently in the studio working on Jerry’s next release as well as his own.

We are great friends and work together as a duo act throughout South Texas where we have done live and taped radio shows as well as appear on cable TV in Austin.

His music is a mixture of roots-rock-country, with a Cajun flavor and a touch of gospel.  His songs are very unique and are loaded with great hooks and reflections about life and its experiences.  Jerry has been contacted by A&R representatives from Nashville and several Hispanic labels in South Texas for his songs