The Blackberry Winter Legacy Project

Legacy SITE page content

Here's the story

The Blackberry Winter story.

Blackberry Timeline

See the BBW lineup changes through the years.

More-1. Biographics

Biographies of band members

More-2. Photo gallery

Band pictures and memorabilia through the years in no particular order.

More-3. Music clips Pages 1-5

Music clips of BBW studio recordings.

More-4. Music Shoppe Pages 6-7

Here you can purchase full band recordings and merchandise items including T-shirts.

blah blah blah

Music Shoppe

Here you can purchase full band recordings and merchandise items including T-shirts.

BBW's Heartland Legacy

My years in Blackberry Winter 1975-1983

In the beginning there was music...maybe not in the very dawn of man, but eventually there was music! And humans created it. Most of our lives are made of memories and moments in time which are indelibly connected and associated with music. Blackberry Winter was one of those moments/years in time for me. I played guitar in the band from August of 1975 until its hiatus in 1983, two years after the band relocated to Southern California. The band had just recorded an album in Los Angeles with producer Sye Mitchell which was self financed. They had been touring heavily to promote it at the time I joined. After I first joined, a few of us bought an Ampex AG440 1" 8 track tape recorder. We drove from Lincoln, Nebraska to Stillwater, Oklahoma (and right back) to buy that tape machine, but it was the best $4500.00 the band ever spent. We recorded about ten albums worth of original music in our pursuit to get signed. Most of it on the Ampex although some earlier recordings were done on a Teac 3340 4-track machine. Most of the songs on these recordings were never heard except by record company A&R people. A few we played live but most of them were studio adventures to give to record companies. I ended up being the band librarian and keeper of the tape vault...partly out of necessity because nobody had the space, time or interest in all those master tapes. We had just spent eight years of our lives trying furiously to procure a recording contract to no avail. Morale was at an absolute low. Everyone was spent. All those tapes... It really was a massive amount of material to haul around and store for years. But all that music...what was to be done with it? Over the last forty years I have been told numerous times that maybe some of that music needed to be archived. In all these years nobody has really taken the time to recognize the body of original music that this band produced. After moving to Southern California in 1981, occasionally I would pull out a master tape and listen to it. Then finally in 2000 or so...around the time of the new millennia I decided to transfer some of the tapes to digital for archive purposes but also to see how they sounded after nearly thirty years in the vault. Eventually I was able to revitalize, secure and transfer the entire catalog of recorded music to digital, and at that point I began to sort through all the masters. So much fun! So interesting to hear these songs after all that time had passed. We had no producer or engineer, we were just flying by the seat of our pants. Winging it. We just dove in and started recording. Eventually we stumbled upon an Auditronics recording console (Son of 36 grand, the Tom Scholz model) from a defunct studio in Lincoln and installed that into our basement studio in South Lincoln. And that is how the journey continued for 8 years. This website tells a story about that certain place in time, and the people who created an entity that has played on for over fifty years and delighted millions in the journey to spread fun, the joy of music and creativity to the Heartland of Nebraska and throughout the Midwest Plains. How is it that something so intangible could endure such a lasting legacy? Read on to find out the whole story. And thanks for taking the time to check us out. Please enjoy. All the pages. And there are a bunch. Pictures. Biographies. Music clips. Music shoppe. It's all here if you take the time. Listening to and remixing all of this music after forty-eight years was quite an extraordinary, emotional journey for me. I hope it gets discovered and enjoyed so the people in the Heartland and elsewhere can know the full story of where and how Blackberry Winter began, and how it shifted and morphed over the years. It's crazy that it is a band that continues to perform and delight people to this day.

Fifty-One years on.

Cheers, Frederick Bettge. Fall 2023.

A vintage picture of all the band members

Born of One-Nighters. Blood, Sweat, & Tears...Arkansas & Louisiana

In the beginning in 1972, the Band’s manager Bob Codr from CID productions in Lincoln had a vision that doing a tour in the South would enable the band to present itself as a Southern rock band with horns.CID had developed some strong promotional ties in that area and Mr. Codr wanted to spread his entertainment influence for the agency and his musical endeavors as well. Codr knew why this was important and the Blackberries fulfilled their duties and executed that tour in a converted Bluebird school bus. When they returned home to the Heartland, they were hailed as the rock horn band Blackberry Winter from the South. Over the next few years, BBW logged thousands of miles gigging and grinding away —with the occasional festival or opening slot act. They were sharpening their live act and working up original songs in anticipation of recording an album of newly created Blackberry Winter original compositions. And who would have believed that this musical entity would still exist...50 years on. Support us by buying merchandise or a music album today.