Pro Portfolio: A Musician in the Woodshop

Click the link at right to listen to a narrated slideshow detailing the work of John Cameron who was featured on the back cover of FWW #206.

John Cameron’s first career was in music. A keyboardist, saxophonist and vocalist, he studied at Berklee College of Music and then spent fifteen years recording and touring with Bim Skala Bim, a Boston-based ska reggae band. To make ends meet in the band’s early years, Cameron worked days as a boatbuilder and furnituremaker. By the time he no longer needed a day job to supplement his musical income he was deeply immersed in woodworking. He set up a small shop in his basement and made furniture there between tours.

In the early 1990s Cameron took a sabbatical from the band to study cabinetmaking under James Krenov at the College of the Redwoods in Fort Bragg, California. After two years there he returned to Boston and Bim Skala Bim. But he also rented space in a co-operative woodshop and began to make furniture more seriously. The shop was populated by faculty and graduates of Boston’s superb North Bennet Street School, widely known for its emphasis on traditional furniture. As Cameron made furniture in his new shop the methods he’d learned at the Krenov school were supplemented by what he learned from his new colleagues. By 2000 he had quit the band and was working wood full time.

Several years ago Cameron and his wife, Ann Conneman, a talented bookbinder, printmaker and graphic designer, moved to Gloucester, Massachusetts, a historic harbor town an hour north of Boston where Cameron’s great-grandfather worked as a halibut fisherman. These days, in a shop nestled between the harbor and the sea, Cameron divides his work time between furnituremaking and building cabinets and kitchens. He also builds bamboo flyrods and makes wood engravings—prints made by engraving the end-grain of blocks of boxwood. Although his career has shifted tracks, he hasn’t left music behind. Each Thursday night he drives his pickup down to Boston to play soul music with The Phil Pemberton Band.

Audio slideshow produced by Jonathan Binzen