Dean Johnson was given his first guitar at fourteen. Putting chords together through trial and error and artistic intuition remained a casual, mostly isolated endeavor for many years. By his late twenties Dean had written one song with words and was well into his thirties before he began to sing with any regularity. A small pile of original songs had amassed while working at a neighborhood bar in Seattle where new friendships led to playing electric guitar in the bands Davidson Hart Kingsbery and The Sons of Rainier. These bands were key to establishing the musical community which encouraged him to sing his own songs on Seattle stages.