John Alvah Barnes, Jr.
Naomi Lynn Barnes
Now available in its entirety!
Jay Barlow Collection
Subscribe
Sign up to our newsletter and stay up to date
About Alvah Arts
My wife, Lynn, and I met at Kennett High School in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania in 1975, when I was a seventeen-year-old senior and she was a twenty-five-year-old ninth-grade English teacher. No, she was never my teacher, at least not in school. We met in study hall where I was pretending to study, and she was a study hall monitor. We started talking and discovered that we both loved to read, and we also shared a deep appreciation for poetry and music. She played clarinet and oboe, and I had been teaching myself the guitar for several years and singing since I was a toddler. We started writing songs together, her poetry set to my guitar chord patterns and tunes. This eventually became our first company, Alvah Music, and we copyrighted more than a dozen songs.