Josh's BIO
I grew up in Provo, Utah. My father was an economics professor for BYU and my mother was a stay at home mom. I’m the youngest of 7 kids. At the age of 4, my parents started me on classical violin lessons. It was a family tradition. Or maybe better put, it was part of my parents plan to raise hard working, responsible children. We all started on classical violin at a young age. For me, it was novel at first, and then what do you know, it started to feel like hard work. But my parents, especially my Mom, were as dedicated as they wanted me to be, so she would get up with us every morning to help us practice. (i.e. make sure we did it.) Dad made breakfast.
It didn’t take too long for people to take interest in our family. Some bluegrass musician that evidently specialized in family band creating stopped by our house one day and offered to teach us some fiddle tunes. He came by the next day with a banjo and a mandolin. I was 4 or 5 at the time, so I wasn’t involved much, but my older siblings loved it. The Dutton Family Bluegrass Band was born.
This is where I’ll keep it kind of short. It was a hobby at first, but through a series of events, we decided to do it professionally and in 1991 we landed 9 months worth of shows all over the US. I was 11 and I only saw my home once during that entire time. It was also around that time that I started getting more interested in music. I picked up the harmonica by the time I was 12 and the drums by the time I was 14. It was the first time our family band had a drummer, and it also marked us branching out into more styles of music: Country, Rock, Jazz, and Blues along with the Bluegrass and Classical. The name changed from The Dutton Family Bluegrass Band to The Dutton Family and later just The Duttons.
A mentor of mine got me interested in The Blues, and I wrote my first song, a blues song, when I was 12. I kept my interest as a song writer and kept writing songs throughout my teenage years. I wrote what I consider my first “good” song when I was 16, and I wrote a song, “Running From The Rain” when I was 18, which is on the Freely Bound debut album.
We averaged about 250 shows a year on the road and got more successful along the way. Some of my older siblings got married and started having their own families, so we decided to settle down and move to Branson, Missouri where we could keep doing shows, but be more centrally located. Things went well in Branson, and we started leasing our own theater.
left in 1999 to do a 2 year mission for the LDS church. While I was gone, my family bought the theater we were leasing which also came with a hotel and another building that we later turned into a restaurant. Right after I returned from my mission trip, I met my wife Evette. We spent a lot of time together and it took us only 2 months to get engaged and another 3 ½ months to get married.
got right back into performing with my family, and I also got involved in Management as my wife and I started to manage The Dutton Inn. Our life continued centered around my families business and our own family. We had our first child, our son Joshua, about a year and a half later.
knew about my wife’s involvement in music so I encouraged her so start making music with me. It wasn’t until more then a year into our marriage that I even found out she wrote music. We started having a fun time with it. I would run my songs by her, and she would run hers by me. We had fun giving each other suggestions and one day, Evette came to me with this awesome song idea, and we ended up writing our first song together, “Blinded By Your Silence.”
started trying to get an album project going of original music with my family, but I had a little bit of a problem. The style of music that my family is best at is Bluegrass and Country, but I felt that most of my songs were Rock. My wife felt the same way about her songs. So, my first solution was to try and incorporate all the different elements into one album. We sought out arrangers and started with a few songs, but it was too difficult. There were way too many opinions amongst my family members, and it was too tough to please everybody. I also realized that in our case, it wasn’t a good idea to merge the styles too much. So I decided to do my own project with my wife the way we wanted to do it. Not only did that decision create for me a wonderful outlet to do the music project that I’m now the most proud of, but it also freed it up to make The Dutton album what it should be instead of mixing the two. That project has been very rewarding for me as well.
We formed Freely Bound and I got to develop a new skill that I have really come to enjoy: arranging music. We have finished our first album, He Said, She Said, and have had the wonderful opportunity to work with other awesome musicians and arrangers. I currently continue to play full time with my family. My wife is now involved in my families show as well, and on top of that, we look forward to having more success with Freely Bound.
