About

Jeanine and David Ridenour are a wife-and-husband
vocal/multi-instrumental duo based in Cincinnati, Ohio.
A native of Chicago, Illinois, Jeanine grew up on her
parents’ 1950s rock ’n’ roll records, along with Kenny Rogers,

Freddy Fender, Johnny Mathis, Mario Lanza, and movie-
musical soundtracks. She took piano lessons, sang on the

swingset and at the dinner table, and taught doo-wop harmony
to her stuffed animals, eventually taking up the violin (dubbed
“The Screech” by her younger siblings) in high school. At 21
she began singing in bands in the Cincinnati area, and kept
singing as Life took her to southern California, where she took
up the guitar and soon began working as a solo act. Life moved
her again, this time to Nashville, Tennessee, where her old
violin mysteriously transformed into a fiddle; this inspired her to
start practicing jigs, reels, breakdowns, two-steps and Jay
Unger tunes, and cemented her passion for bluegrass, country
and folk music. Her mature influences include Alison Krauss,
Norah Jones, Mary-Chapin Carpenter, Janis Joplin and Joni
Mitchell. Her primary instruments are voice, fiddle, keyboards
and guitar, but she is coming along on the accordion and has
been spotted playing viola (“alto fiddle”), guitar, dulcimer, bass
guitar, ukulele, harmonica, melodica, mandolin, octave mandolin
and bodrhan. Who knows what she’ll pick up next.

She was warned as a child by her mother that “If you

sing at the dinner table, you’ll marry a Crazy Man.”

Born in Mineral Wells, Texas and raised in and around
Ashland, Kentucky, David picked out songs on the family piano
and holed up in his bedroom listening to The Beatles, Simon &
Garfunkel, Chicago, CSN&Y and his father’s old jazz and
comedy records while the other boys were out in the fresh air

playing football and shooting deer. He spent his high school
years marching around football fields in a shako and playing
trombone in a local big band, dabbling with the guitar and
gradually coming under the spell of artists such as Miles Davis,
Weather Report, Ornette Coleman, Pat Metheny, Bob Dylan
and Keith Jarrett. He began his musical studies at Morehead
State University as a trombone major, but switched to guitar in
order to get out of marching band and to increase his odds of
employment. Playing all kinds of music with all kinds of bands
in all kinds of situations all over the place, he settled in
Cincinnati in the early 1990s where he continues to play gigs
and teach and listen to Miles. Primarily a guitarist and vocalist,
he has a long and sordid history with the trombone, is practicing
the bass fiddle, mandolin and trumpet, and has been known to
commit the odd musical malapropism with many of the same
secondary instruments his wife has been spotted with. Please
don’t hand him a violin.

Jeanine and David met in Cincinnati in 1997 and worked
as a duo on-and-off for a few years before Life moved her to
California (and later Tennessee). Re-connecting in 2015 via a
series of increasingly flirtatious emails, they finally fell in love
the following June when she came up to Cincinnati and sat in
on one of his gigs. They’ve been together ever since.