Barry Melton

Life and career

Melton was born in Brooklyn, New York, the son of secretary Taube "Tillie" (née Kuchuck) and James Melton, an HVAC engineer who taught at Los Angeles City College. His mother was from an East Coast Jewish family (her parents were from Odessa) and his father was from a Texas pioneer family and shares ancestry in colonial Virginia with George Washington, as well as deep roots in Ireland.

Raised in Brooklyn's Brighton Beach neighborhood and the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles, California, Melton served as a Congress of Racial Equality volunteer during Freedom Summer and participated in a demonstration against Trần Lệ Xuân during her September–October 1963 lecture tour of Europe and the United States. Having previously studied under Kay Kyser guitarist Milton Norman for much of his youth at the instigation of his parents, Melton initially befriended future bandmate Bruce Barthol in his high school's folk music club. After ascending to the presidency of that organization, Melton became ensconced in the American folk music revival in earnest, playing at such venues as the Ash Grove. A summer 1964 hitchhiking excursion to the San Francisco Bay Area and his hometown of New York City yielded his first introduction to Joe McDonald at a Malvina Reynolds concert in the Bay Area.

After graduating early from Ulysses S. Grant High School in January 1965, Melton—inspired by S.I. Hayakawa's writings on general semantics—enrolled at San Francisco State University, where Hayakawa taught. Dissuaded by the fact that Hayakawa only taught upper-division courses and "lured away by the music," he dropped out after ten weeks, reuniting with McDonald in nearby Berkeley, California; paralleling the development of such contemporaneous groups as the Grateful Dead, various duo and jug band-oriented permutations of their act (centered around the Jabberwock, a Berkeley coffeehouse) would evolve into Country Joe and The Fish by early 1966.

With a desire to eschew the rigors of a touring lifestyle while maintaining his countercultural values following the birth of his first son in 1977, he enrolled in the law program at La Salle Extension University, a now-defunct correspondence law school. After earning his juris doctor from Ocean University (a similar institution) and passing the California bar exam in 1982, Melton maintained a private criminal defense practice in San Francisco for twelve years before becoming the deputy public defender of Mendocino County, California in 1994. Following a brief tenure as California's deputy state public defender from 1998-1999, he took a position with Yolo County, California, eventually retiring from nominal government service in 2009 as the county's chief public defender. Since then, he has resumed his private practice and worked as a subcontractor for Lake Defense, the contract provider of indigent defense services in Lake County, California. He is certified as a specialist in criminal law by the State Bar of California Board of Legal Specialization.

Melton also continues to be active in music. Since 2001, he has performed in Italy, England, France, Thailand and Russia (including a performance with the Russian band Crossroadz in Moscow). He often appears with his own band, mainly around northern California, and generally tours Europe briefly in the summer. Peter Albin of Big Brother and The Holding Company has continued to play with Melton for over 40 years.