Randy Scott Fenimore

Randy Scott Fenimore lived off the grid, figuratively and literally. Probably a man born in the wrong era. He was loved by any society, but social structure was a construct he didn’t much subscribe to. Free spirit, rebel without a cause, rambling man, rolling stone, pick your trope; he lived it. 

When people tell you they built their own home, they actually mean they hired a contractor to sub out every phase of the construction until a house is there, and the people claiming “they built” it, did little more than pay a lot of middlemen to make it happen. When RS Fenimore says he built his home, he meant it as much as anything can be meant. He carved out the raw materials from the woods, carried them up a steep hill one by one where a heavenly southern view framed a majestic slice of rural Madison County, Iowa waiting as the destination to a man’s dream. Log by log, limestone by limestone the man crafted a cabin 1/4 of a mile back into the woods. Twenty-five years total it took him to piece it together the way he envisioned, but I’ll be damned if it wasn’t as much a part of him as his own flesh and blood by the time he called it home. His children were born and raised there, he wrote and recorded beautiful music there, retired there and almost died there a few times. 

His music and his cabin are a manifestation of the sometimes tormented but always perfectly human spirit of RS Fenimore. He required very little out of the world, but gave life, love and liberty back. As far away from people as he was, the people sure did love him when they were spoiled with his company.

Scott Fenimore was a father, a husband, a brother, a grandfather, a tree man, an artist, a craftsman, a poet, and a survivor. No one survives forever but few would have made it past the first crotch of the tree on his same journey. The man is gone but if anyone reading this wishes to know him, he left his soul in the ether via music. It’s out there forever.