David Lindley
David Perry Lindley (born March 21, 1944) is an American musician who founded the band El Rayo-X, and who has worked with many other performers including Jackson Browne, Warren Zevon, Curtis Mayfield and Dolly Parton. He has mastered such a wide variety of instruments that Acoustic Guitar magazine referred to Lindley not as a multi-instrumentalist, but instead as a “maxi-instrumentalist.”
The majority of the instruments that Lindley plays are string instruments, including the acoustic and electric guitar, upright and electric bass, banjo, lap steel guitar, mandolin, hardingfele, bouzouki, cittern, bağlama, gumbus, charango, cümbüş, oud, and zither.
Lindley was a founding member of the 1960s band Kaleidoscope, and has worked as musical director for several touring artists. In addition, he has occasionally scored and composed music for film.
When Lindley was growing up in Los Angeles, his father had an extensive collection of 78 rpm records that included Korean folk and Indian sitar music. Lindley took up the violin at age 3, but broke the bridge. He then moved on to the baritone ukelele in his early teens. Then Lindley took to playing the banjo and the fiddle. By his late teens, he was acknowledged as an award-winning player, having won the Topanga Banjo•Fiddle Contest five times.