Paul H. Hansen

Vocalist, guitarist, songwriter.

Hansen was born July 16, 1943, in Aledo, Illinois, but moved a few years later to Kewanee, Illinois, after his father took a new teaching position there. He earned a bachelor's degree from Northern Illinois University before attending the Lutheran School of Theology at Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois. Around the time he recorded [r14846903], he was delivering light spirits for the A. B. Carlson Company and performing nightly at the Chelshire Grille in the Sheraton Hotel in downtown Rock Island. After managing the ecumenical Jawbone Coffee House in the resort town of Wisconsin Dells during the summer of 1967, Hansen continued his studies at the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago before serving as an intern pastor and vicar of the First English Lutheran Church in Austin, Texas, for the 1968-69 school year. By the early 1970s, he had become the youth services director at Smith Haven Ministries, a church-sponsored service organization at the Smith Haven Shopping Mall in Smithtown, Long Island, New York. During that time, he released the album, [r11787503], for the Lutheran Church’s Commission on Youth Ministry. A booklet included with that album featured line drawings by his wife, Sherry. Following a pastorship in the Denver, Colorado, area, Hansen settled in the mid 1970s near Newark, Ohio, and continues his work there 50 years later as a self-described "hippie pastor serving a congregation in rural Ohio, guitar player, entrepreneur."