PHONE: 856-520-4000
EMAIL: mccrory123@gmail.com

Chuck McCrory has been a guitarist for over 30-years and has performed all over the Delaware Valley in numerous bands in the original, classic rock and blues genres.

Weaned on Elvis by his Mother, Chuck laughingly admits that his first professional gig was with an Elvis impersonator when he was just 17-years old. Chuck remembers wearing a big cowboy hat and was told to look down to conceal his age because he wasn't old enough to be performing in bars!

Later in his twenties Chuck met RCA recording artist Robert Hazard, who was managing an up-and-coming band called “Laura & the Lifeboys”. Through his association with Hazard, Chuck played many of the larger venues in Philadelphia, had airplay on WMMR’s Street Beat, and the opportunity to open for national acts such as Epic recording artists the Romantics.

In the 80’s Chuck won numerous “honorable mention” awards from Billboard Magazine’s “Song Writers” contests, where he was judged by legends in the industry such as Frank Zappa, Peter Cetera and Carol Bayer-Sager.

Finding as much frustration trying to get his songs published as it was to try to make it as an artist in the business, Chuck opted to go back to college to pursue an Art Education degree, which proved to be useful in promoting his bands later in his career.

During that time, Chuck frequented a local Jazz/Blues club in Merchantville, NJ where he first cut his teeth performing blues. Playing blues opened another world for Chuck and the more he played, the more his passion had grown for blues music. He started off as a ‘gun for hire’ with bands such as Mark Stinger & the Swarm, James “Thunderbird" Ford, Courtney Freeman and former Sonny Rhodes bassist, Jerry “Cowboy” Haynes who had backed or opened for all the blues greats, such as Luther Tucker, Albert Collins, Gatemouth Brown and B. B. King, among others. Chuck learned a lot about the blues from his association with “Cowboy”.

In the mid 90’s Chuck formed and fronted his first blues band, the widely recognized “Smoke Stack Lightnin”, which performed all over South Jersey and Philadelphia. Since then he has played in many other blues projects such as “PineWolf and the Pack” and has seemed to find his niche performing blues.