Ed Denson

ED Denson
Birth name	Eugene Denson
Born	1940 (age 76–77) Washington D.C., United States
Occupation(s)	Music group manager, record producer, record label owner, lawyer

Eugene "ED" Denson (the capitalization of both letters in his "first name" is his own spelling that evolved from constantly using his initials) is an American music group manager, producer, record label owner, and, later, lawyer, who has made notable contributions to folk, blues, and early San Francisco rock.

Denson was born in Washington, D.C., in 1940. His parents were civil servants, and they had a succession of homes in suburbs of Washington in Montgomery County, Maryland, each home being a bit larger and a bit farther from the city. He has one sister, Helen, who is four years younger. Denson was educated in the public schools, except for one year at Fishburne Military School. While attending the University of Maryland, in College Park, intending to study physics, he became interested in folk music and learned much from the record collector Dick Spottswood. He met John Fahey, Robbie Basho, and Max Ochs—all folk guitarists—before leaving for the West Coast with his first wife, the guitarist and singer Pat Sullivan. There he became a student of English, first at Merritt College, then at the Berkeley campus of the University of California. In the late 1960s, Denson and his first wife divorced, and he married Gloria Naramatsu. They remained together for a decade, living in a brown shingle house in the Oakland foothills. They divorced in the late 1970s, and she moved to Washington State when she remarried, and became the Postmaster of the town in which she and her husband live. Pat Sullivan, it is reported, died of a heart attack in the mid-1990s. Denson and Mary Alice Sexton moved to a 30 acre "ranch" in Alderpoint, a small ex-mill town in northern California, where they were married soon after and where they live today.

Around 1963, in the wake of Fahey's location of Bukka White, Denson and John Fahey set up Takoma Records with Norman Pierce as their first distributor. The label was a pioneer of what was to become the Indie records movement. Denson produced one or two of Fahey's early albums for the label, and by getting Tom Weller to design psychedelic covers for them helped shape John's early image. He brought Robbie Basho to the label. In the early 1960s, he was the road manager for the Blues Project and then for Mississippi John Hurt, helped manage and produce records of Bukka White, and Skip James, after Fahey located White and James was found by a folklorist in Mississippi. He sold his interest in Takoma records to Fahey in the mid-1960s.

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