Gary Green (2)

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Gary Michael Green (born February 1, 1954) was once known as one of America's most intense folk singers, civil rights and union organizers and advocate of Native American rights. His three record albums, recorded in the 1970s on New York’s legendary Folkways records became part of the Smithsonian’s collection in the 1980s . In 2006 his work was rediscovered by Alternate Rock singer Frank Black who recorded Green’s “That Burnt Out Rock and Roll .”

Green’s fame reaches far beyond his music. In the 1990s he became one of the true pioneers of the dot-com bubble when he architected e-commerce methodologies and software that went on to do more than 5% of all e-commerce on the planet and won a place as a finalist for the Best of COMDEX (the international high-tech expo) twice.

In the 21st century he is most often identified as one of the country's leading casino executives (or still as the ultimate gambler to some — especially since his appearance in the World Series of Poker last year and his latest book giving a casino boss's inside secrets to players), having worked as a marketing Vice President for Donald Trump and the general manager of several Native American Indian casinos around the United States where he was called the “Donald Trump of Indian Casinos ”.

Early in his career, working as a labor union leader, he was one of the masterminds of the single largest organizing drive in American history. And as a propagandist, his skills had been tapped by members of Congress, presidential candidates, governments, and Fortune 500 corporations. By the time he was 40 he had: published a 250,000-circulation magazine; written a best-selling travel guide; co-owned a Russian Circus; was an award-winning daily newspaper reporter in North Carolina and Tennessee; and a host of controversies along the way.

On the cutting edge of the 1970s avant-garde twilight zone between coming of age baby boomers and the rest of America, one week Gary would be at the side of a veteran member of Congress giving policy or strategic advice and the next week in Greenwich Village playing guitar in one of the dimly-lit, crowd-packed coffee houses. The Baltimore Sun best described Gary's ability to touch, convince, and motivate broad-based audiences: "Mr. Green had them: a young couple with a three-week old baby, a couple well into middle age…and approximately equal numbers of those who seemed to remember the Fifties, and those who looked to have been children in the Sixties, not of them." Born in rural North Carolina and raised in the hills of Tennessee, North Carolina, and Georgia, Gary Green is a braided paradox of simple, working-class Southerners and the high-tech, urban intelligentsia. With a southern charm more akin to John "Doc" Holiday and Rhett Butler than Jeff Foxworthy and the redneck set, he is often referred to as one of the last southern gentleman scoundrels.

He served his apprenticeship singing folkie acoustic versions of Hank Williams , Waylon Jennings, and Johnny Cash songs in New York City folk circles (where is was actually friends with Cash and folk patriarch Pete Seeger. Seeger once wrote, “Hell there should be a ballad of Gary Green.”

With a lifestyle reminiscent of the fantasy-world of 1940s matinee cinema noir serials — even down to his trademark fedora — Gary soars from exploit to adventure to escapade chronicling a myriad of romantic episodes in prose and lyric.

FOOTNOTES

 http://www.folkways.si.edu/search/SearchResults.aspx?AlbumTitle=gary+green&TrackTitle=&ArtistName=&CatalogNumber=&YearOfRelease=&NumItem=10&YearMode=QuickSearch 
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cyog9qDoKC8 
 http://www.casinocitytimes.com/news/article.cfm?contentID=145565
 http://www.garygreen.com