Scott Ramminger is a singer/sax player/songwriter based in the Washington, DC area. He performs several times a week with his band, “Scott Ramminger & The Crawstickers,” and with other bands, primarily in and around the Washington, DC.

Ramminger’s music is firmly based in the blues, but draws from the wide range of American musical styles, including roots rock, R&B, jazz, and country. Growing up just a couple of hours south of Nashville, in Huntsville, Alabama, Ramminger’s formative musical interests included the jazz always playing in his parents home, the southern rock coming out of Macon, Georgia, the R&B coming out of nearby Muscle Shoals, the blues coming out of Chicago, and anything coming out of New Orleans. “On my transistor radio. I could get WOL in New Orleans at night, and WSM out of Nashville. We also got some Nashville TV stations, and used to watch gospel shows on Sunday mornings and The Porter Wagoner Show. Basically, I dug just about every kind of music, from the AM rock of the day, to old school blues and R&B, to Miles Davis and Sonny Rollins, to country, to Dylan, to Steely Dan,” he notes.

“Remember how Jethro Bodine on The Beverly Hillbillies wanted to be either a fry cook or a brain surgeon? Well, that was me as a young guy. I grew up in Space City USA, Huntsville, Alabama. I either wanted to be an astronaut, one of the sax players in the Tonight Show band, or a novelist.”

Ramminger played the saxophone and guitar and fronted a popular North Alabama band, “After Blue.” “We used to take any gig, no matter what sort of band they were looking for. One weekend we would play as a rock band at an enlisted man’s club on the local Army base, where it wasn’t uncommon to be threatened with bodily harm if you couldn’t play a requested song. The next weekend we would play a party for the local theater group where we had to play show tunes all night and let some guy sit in with us on the bagpipes. We all read music, so the piano player and I would just scramble around and write out charts.”

While he considered studying music in college, Ramminger wound up instead as a journalism graduate of the University of Tennessee, working briefly for the “Arkansas Democrat,” and “Knoxville News Sentinel” before moving to Washington DC, where he edited trade magazines on frozen food, concrete products, and food distribution. “That’s given me lots of songwriting material.”

Along the way, Ramminger always played some guitar, and continued to write a few songs. “I got married young, divorced at 31. Got remarried, had three kids in short order. So the music got pushed to the back burner. “ As his kids got older, Ramminger’s desire to make music bubbled back up to the surface.

“I dug an old horn out and started trying to get back after it. Pretty soon I was going to jams. Then I was in a couple of garage bands. Then eventually, I started my own thing, somehow conning some of the best roots and blues players in the DC area into playing with me. I must be doing something right, because I keep getting rehired.”

Ramminger plans to be performing, and writing for a long time to come. “I went to see Sonny Rollins, one of my saxophone heroes, last year. He is still doing it at 80. One of my other musical heroes, Delbert McClinton, is 70 and is still out there slugging away at it. I’m 52. So I figure if I can hang in there, I have a while to keep practicing and honing my craft.”


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