Music and family were Tom Murray’s life. He loved spending time on the beautiful Santa Barbara beaches and in the backcountry. He loved creating things with his hands. Tom grew up in the Santa Barbara foothills in a family that has roots here leading back to the 1860s. He rode his bike through the lemon orchards off Foothill, took his motorcycle out to Caliente Hot Springs, and was a “hotshot” firefighter in Los Padres National Forest — after hearing him play guitar, his boss said, “I think you’re in the wrong profession!”
His sister, Colleen Million, remembered, “In his youth, my brother was crazy about learning to play the guitar. I remember him spending consecutive days in his room, never leaving it, just so that he could play Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton licks over and over on his vinyl record player while teaching his fingers to play all the riffs just like the British blues players. Eventually, he moved on to the great American originators of the blues. He was incredibly dedicated! He went on to study music at the Musician’s Institute in Hollywood and graduated in 1985.”
Tom met Linda Hughes during Fiesta ’81, and they were married the following September. They went together to Los Angeles, and when they returned to Santa Barbara, where Tom attended Santa Barbara City College, he was named music student of the year and won the Mahlon Balderston Scholarship Award. He then applied to UCSB, where he was awarded a Regents Scholarship and majored in music composition at the College of Creative Studies. Through all this, Tom and Linda had four children while working toward their UCSB degrees, Linda’s in educational psychology. Tom played gigs, dreaming of and then building a house for the family. Linda remembered, “We took our young children everywhere with us to listen to live music and see Tom play the big stage. Live Oak was always a special weekend. We counted them as the next generation of aspiring musicians. Tom focused on ethnomusicology and the blues. And we always had music in our house.”
