Bobby Long

Born in Wigan, near Manchester in England’s industrial north, and raised in bucolic Wiltshire (Thomas Hardy’s Wessex), Bobby Long grew up surrounded by music. “My dad played guitar and was really into folk music: Peter, Paul and Mary, Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, people like that, so I was brought up with that and, of course, The Beatles, but the blues was the first thing that I really remember loving. I used to put on blues records by myself when I was 10 or 11 and a lot of the early finger-picking guys like Mississippi John Hurt.” Playing along to old blues records, Bobby, who had tried cello at an early age, fell in love with the guitar. At 18, he moved to the big city, enrolling at London Metropolitan University where he studied music for film and became a regular at the city’s open mic nights. There he also fell in with a tightly-knit community of fellow musicians and actors who would become his close circle of friends. In 2008, he co-wrote a song with one of those friends, musician Marcus Foster, and it found its way into the first of the “Twilight” series of films. The global impact of the film focused attention on him and became the catalyst that brought him to America.