Songwriters@Scup #27, with Cindy Taplin, Doug Davis, and James Anderson

Cindy Taplin grew up in Kernersville and Walkertown surrounded by tobacco farmers and country music.
She graduated from Salem College with a degree in mathematics when she was 40 and promptly started painting and exhibiting her art in Winston Salem.

In her late 40s she picked up the banjo that her son gave her for Christmas. She taught herself a few chords, then started going to a weekly jam session led by her local music hero, Richard Boyd. It wasn’t long before the song ideas started coming, so she bought a guitar and began to write about life and about the world from the perspective of a woman.

In 2018 Cindy attended a songwriting workshop in Nashville with Mary Gauthier. Since then she has returned to study with Gretchen Peters, Verlon Thompson, and Suzy Bogguss. Playing a couple of original songs at the Bluebird Cafe was a dream come true for a shy country girl who was always sure she had the music in her, but didn’t think she had the nerve to share it.

After years of producing, arranging, and composing for artists from across the country, Doug Davis is going all in as a solo singer-songwriter. Drawing on decades of experience performing with musicians like Chris Stamey, Mitch Easter, Alejandro Escovedo, Robyn Hitchcock, Mark Kano, and so many others, Davis infuses his classic American roots style with a bit of everything from power pop to punk.

Doug Davis has opened for Cracker, Tift Merritt, Smashmouth, the Fray, and Sister Hazel, and his sync music has been featured in dozens of television shows and films, including SNL, Dateline, and The Voice. He has also built a successful career as a producer and sound engineer for his own studio in Winston-Salem, NC.

James Anderson offers up: "From my 8th grade band Split Wood, which consisted of two guys, a guitar and a set of coffee cans, to my high school punk rock band Youth in Asia, followed by years of playing in bands in Boston and Seattle during the 1980s -1990s, I tried to work the DIY way of writing and performing music. I came to NC in 1999 for work and took a musical break, which surprisingly became two decades of “woodshedding” my playing and writing chops! I currently perform on acoustic guitar with Gavin Douglas and with my bandmates in Me Against Me (Bryan, Tim and Walter). When I’m not doing that, I'm a professor of Asian History at UNC-Greensboro."