David Ackles - Early Life

Early Life

Ackles said of his birthplace, Rock Island, Illinois: "Not a bad place for an incipient songwriter to get a start." His mother came from a family of English music hall performers and his father was a musician. His family moved to Southern California, and Los Angeles became his lifelong home.

For a few years Ackles was a child actor, appearing in six of the eight films in Columbia Pictures' Rusty children's film series made from 1945 to 1949. He played the character "Peanuts" in the second film in the series (1946's The Return Of Rusty, directed by William Castle) and the uncredited role of Roger "Tuck" Worden in the latter five.

His song "Family Band," on the American Gothic album, "has often been mistaken for a parody, but the story of singing hymns in church on a Sunday evening, 'when my dad played bass, my mom played the drums, and I played piano, and Jesus sang the song,'" was autobiographical. "I come from a very strong, almost doctrinaire Christian background, having been raised — God help me — a Presbyterian." he said. "He was a deeply religious and spiritual man," his wife said of him, "a privately spiritual man who did in fact take part in a community of the church, had a daily ritual of prayer." "oing to church, thinking of things spiritually and having a close relationship with God was very important to him." She thought this may have added to his estrangement from the pop music business of the 1970s.

As children he and his sister performed vaudeville-style duets; they later "mutated" into a folk duo. "We sang the most obscure folk songs we could find. The more obscure they were, the more people liked them." He had known from childhood that he wanted to write songs and produce music. ("But a recording artist? Not on your life!")

He studied English literature at the University of Southern California, spending his junior year at the University of Edinburgh, where he studied "West Saxon, the origins of the English language." He earned a masters degree in Film Studies at USC. In 1997, when asked why he chose to major in English rather than music, he said, "I wanted to learn to do it all, which meant learning the construction of poetry, so I could write my own lyrics and play construction so that I could write the book to whatever musical I was creating. In the end, it in no way limited my horizons, being an English major. In fact it opened up the possibility to do so many things." His wife said, "His ultimate goal when he was younger was to write, produce, direct, design the sets, do the music, and star in his work. And he could have done it. That's where his heart was."

While working a string of rent-paying jobs after college — "private detective, security guard and circus roustabout" — he was simultaneously composing "musicals, ballet scores and choral pieces. These early experiences and enthusiasms were to leave a mark on his songwriting, and helped form a distinctively theatrical singing style."