Judge Bennett Official Site

John was born in Houston, Texas, in 1949 and moved many times in his formative year (Southern California in 1954, Arkansas in 1957, Northern California in 1960 and back to SoCal in 1962). In Junior High and High School John sang with choirs and stage musicals. At the same time he worked in the school library and became enthralled by all the literature there and especially by many of the great poets. In 1967 John discovered Bob Dylan and listened to the Beatles’ St. Peppers Album and fell in love with good songwriting.

It wasn’t until 1969 that John accidentally discovered that he was a songwriter when a friend left an old Harmony guitar overnight. John could not put that guitar down all night long and immediately wrote 3 songs using chords that he just made up. Within 2 weeks John had learned how to finger pick and amazed his friends how quickly he self taught himself how to play the guitar.

Now Southern California wasn’t the greatest musical area for John’s newfound creativity, so John packed up his VW camper and headed north to experience life outside of Orange County. And so began his traveling period through Northern California, and Idaho, Colorado, Canada, East Coast, Midwest down the Mississippi River in a raft, New Orleans, Key West Florida the East Coast and finally winding up in Minneapolis. He immediately discovered that in Minneapolis there was a thriving musical scene and decided to settle down there. He lived on the West Bank and spent much of his time at the local coffeehouses [Extempore and Riverside coffeehouses]. There he listened to many of the folk and blues artists coming through town. He also wrote many songs during this period and performed at many open stages.

After a brief marriage and being a father to his son Lucas, John began the first songwriters' organization in Minnesota called Minnesota Songwriters Association, which helped many songwriters locally to improve their skills, network, and perform at a songwriter’s showcase which ran at the Coffeehouse Extempore for 2 years. From this group came songwriters who became successful in Nashville with number 1 songs on the radio. MSA became a large nonprofit organization, that held seminars and had its own office space until it burned down in the early eighties. MSA did not recover after that however new organizations were born in its wake and still exist today.

In 1985 John who was an atheist who had a change of heart and became a Christian. He played his guitar and sang in the churches that he attended and with renewed spiritual inspiration wrote numerous songs. John attended a small group of Christian songwriters for 2 years, but when that group broke up John began another non-profit organization in 1992 and called it the Minnesota Association of Christian Songwriters, which is still going strong today at macsmn.org. Over the years John has performed with many people on stage locally and played in a variety of bands. Between 1995 and 1998 John produced four CDs of original songs, as well as producing numerous albums for other songwriters under his own company Storehouse Productions. Later John met up with Tom and Jim and Judge Bennett was born. [See band history]