No. 21 Vol. 2
www.mypaperonline.com • 973-809-4784 February 2025
Guitarist Continues to Inspire and Perform
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By Evan Wechman enville’s renowned blues guitarist Toby Walker has played worldwide, but he always makes his way back to New Jersey. For decades, he has entertained music aficionados in the Garden State and even taught others in the area how to master the guitar. Walker, who lived in Denville for about two decades, went to Asheville, North Carolina last year to join the emerging music scene. After playing in some small but intimate venues there, the hurricane hit, and he narrowly escaped unscathed. He fortunately got a flight to England where he toured the area with his unique brand of guitar playing. Walker returned after a few months to the place he has always called home, Denville, New Jersey. For Walker, the area serves as a reminder of the good times he has had entertaining fans in the state. He can still recall when he was introduced to the guitar. “I was nine, and I think my parents bought me this cheap little guitar and there was this preacher that lived in town, and he was showing me a couple of things, but they were kind of hard to play. And it was springtime and baseball season was coming, so I put the guitar in the closet, got my baseball mitt and I didn’t get serious about it until I was about 14. And when I was 14, I picked it up, and that was it. That was all I did,” Walker said. Since that time, Walker has never ventured far from the guitar. He plans on returning to the Morristown Unitarian Universalist Fellowship church to join friends at New Jerseys’ The Folk Project, an acoustic concert, and hopefully play some more dates throughout the tri-state area. Walker loves to play great blues, folk, or rock songs and has reached levels others have only dreamed of attaining. Not every local musician has had the great experience of playing with Jorma Kaukonen, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee from Hot Tuna and Jefferson Airplane. Walker helped teach aspiring guitar players at Kaukonen’s camp, the Fur Peace Ranch. On Walker’s website (Toby Walker - Home), he shares a quote from the famous guitarist. “Flat out…you have to hear this great musician…I’m blown away,” Kaukonen said.
Photo by Larry Sribnick, Denville
Praise like that can easily get to one’s head, but for Walker, it’s all about gratitude. He feels fortunate to have spent such quality time honing his skills and is humbled by what Kaukonen said. “It’s really nice. It was flattering. Yeah, just to teach at Yorma’s guitar camp was a real honor, and to hang out and play with them a bit, to see some people that I grew up listening to, it was nice to be on the same stage with them or be in the same area teaching right along with them, that was pretty much a big thrill. “ Walker, who has also produced hundreds of instructional guitar videos, wants to continue to assist others in the community become better players. Though he enjoys performing on stage, he also finds teaching extremely rewarding. “When you’re playing on stage, you’re having an audience react to you, and then you, in turn, react to them. It keeps spiraling back and forth, whereas, when you’re teaching someone, you can see how much they’re passionate about it, and getting into it. But then years later, when you find out that they’re out there playing, or they’re out there teaching, and they attribute it to being inspired by you, it’s kind of nice to know you passed it on, and paid it forward a little bit, and it’s still being paid forward.”