Steven Watts

Guitar, Vocals & Keyboard

Like many red-blooded American teenagers in the late 1960s, Steven Watts got his musical start in a garage band.  He had learned how to sing in church as a kid—those old hymns often have wonderful vocal harmonies—and had taken classical guitar lessons for a couple of years at his parents’ insistence but they never quite took. Then for some reason media images of long-haired guys with electric guitars surrounded by screaming girls got his adolescent attention. He entered the rock universe playing along with records by The Byrds and was swept up in the music of the LA folk/country/rock bands such as Buffalo Springfield, CSNY, and Poco. He and a guitar-playing friend found a drummer and a bass player, figured out some three-part vocal harmonies, and started rattling the garage walls on a regular basis.

After arriving at the University of Missouri in 1970, he played in several rock bands performing at dorm dances, fraternity parties, high school proms, and mid-Missouri clubs before joining an acoustic bluegrass & swing band during graduate school in the early 1980s. Following a decade-long hiatus from music while launching an academic career, in the mid-1990s he joined, along with Steve Brooks, a “rural rhythm & blues” group, Big Muddy, that performed for the next twenty years in the Columbia area. Around 2016, after some personnel changes, it evolved into the present group, Flyover Country.

In recent years, Watts has grown to love songwriting. He contributed a bunch of songs to Flyover Country’s 2019 CD, “Too Thick to Drink, Too Thin to Plow” and has been busy composing tunes for a follow-up CD before too long. The present lineup in Flyover Country is, across the board, the best group of musicians with whom he has ever played and he hopes they can keep making music together for a good long time.

Soren Larsen

Guitar & Vocals

Soren Larsen is a third-generation musician who started out playing the same instrument his dad and grandfather did: trombone. Then, in his early teens, he discovered The Who and the switch to guitar was a foregone conclusion. He started out with a Peavy Patriot purchased in update New York for $175, and now plays a 1993 Gibson Nighthawk, a high-school graduation gift from none other than his trombonist father!

Soren studied jazz theory with John Bishop (guitarist for Ray Charles) and classical guitar with Dan Rubio at Illinois State University, and also played guitar in the jazz band for three years of his time there. He started out gigging with the Global Rhythm Ensemble in Bloomington, Illinois, before taking a ten-year hiatus while completing his PhD in Geography and finding gainful employment.

Shortly after moving to Columbia, he joined Flyover Country in 2008, back when it was known as Big Muddy—and he hasn’t been thrown out yet!

Neil Minturn

Keyboards

Neil Minturn has been at music for a long time, beginning with piano lessons around age 8. After flirting with chemistry in college, he opted for music and continued his study of music theory through graduate school. He has been teaching at the university level for nearly 35 years, beginning with a stint at the Hudson Correctional Facility, following which he taught at the Eastman School of Music. For the past 24 years he taught at the University of Missouri School of Music before retiring in 2021.

In 1979, along with Henry Franzoni and the late Fred Chalenor, he helped found Face Ditch, a west coast progressive band. In 2005, he published The Last Waltz of the Band, a study of Martin Scorsese’s film about The Band’s final concert. These days he seeks out performing opportunities so he can continue learning about music and learning about playing keyboards.

In recent years he has played for the Columbia Civic Orchestra; accompanied singers (in art song, show tunes, and jazz standards); played small-group jazz; and played progressive and largely improvised music.   The music of Flyover Country is comfortably familiar for him—it’s the music he grew up with.  (Like all the members of the band, Neil is over 21….)

Jerry Rowden

Bass and Vocals

Jerry is a lifelong musician whose career spans more than four decades. A native of Kansas City, Kansas, he earned a Bachelor of Music Education from Emporia State University before heading out to rural Kansas for several years to teach instrumental and vocal music for grades 5–12. While in Emporia, he played trumpet in a Mexican band, Los Amigos. Later, he completed formal training in musical instrument repair at Trinidad State Junior College in Colorado, while also teaching music theory and instrumental classes, and performing with The Stovepipe Band, a five-piece cover group. After moving to Denver, he worked in instrument repair while appearing with a 13-piece big band, the Jay Wieder Orchestra. 1984 saw him relocate to Columbia, MO, where he played electric bass in various local groups—Hazard County Band, Partners in Crime, Timber River Band—and worked in several local music stores. In 2007, he founded “Jerry’s Instrument Shop,” which specialized in the repair and maintenance of wind instruments. After retiring from this business in 2023, he joined Flyover Country two years later, where he occupies a crucial, if contrary, position: holding down the low end of things instrumentally on the bass and adding the high harmonies to the group’s vocal sound. He tries not to get the two confused since he could get hurt!

Monte Safford

Drums

The percussion itch struck Monte at age 8 and he hasn’t quit scratching it since. His older siblings had an impressive collection of Beatles’ 45s and the sleeves fascinated him with their pictures of the band onstage with Ringo beating those Ludwig drums. So he got out his mom’s pots and pans, grabbed some stirring spoons, and had his first drum kit!  By junior high school he got his hands on a real drum-set and was into garage band jams with friends and playing in “Up With People” shows in local towns and schools. During high school, he played the hard-rocking sounds of the 70s around Missouri, and later years took him on the road performing with a variety of bands in music clubs in many eastern, southern and midwestern states. Over the last two or three decades, Monte has kept the drumming pulse beating with many rock and jazz groups in mid-Missouri, including the Jazz Ladds, the Nightdrifters, the Brass Brothers, Smile Away, Primitive Soul, Planet Jazz, and recording groups at PS Studios and Mansion Studios. He started sitting in with Flyover Country in the early 2020s and now enjoys being their regular drummer. Only occasionally does he bring out the pots and pans during shows!