Strumming Away

Local guitar legend Lew Palladino isn’t slowing down

By Charles Jeffries

It was more than five decades ago when a young guitar player named Lew Palladino was asked to sit in for a night with a band whose regular guitar player couldn’t make it. Then 14, Palladino ended up playing the entire week with that band in The Vogue Room in the Colonial Hotel in Hagerstown. The band, the Vogue Room, and the Colonial are long gone, but you’ll still find Lew Palladino out there playing today’s popular venues like Prohibition Hub, Antietam Brewery, Blue Mountain Winery, and Mountaineer Meat Smokers.

His career has now spanned 55 years and included bands like his high school group called the Fantastic Flames and then the power trio of the Rhythm Kings, whose funk, blues, and rock sound could be heard around the area from 1992 to 2022. These days he plays with Todd Haines in a duo they call The Howlers.

Anyone who has hung around the local music scene for any length of time knows Palladino, either as a performer or a guitar instructor. Others who play music on the local level do it as a side gig to their full-time job. Palladino has always made his living in music. 

“Once I had a part-time job for three of four months,” he says. “I don’t even remember the name of the place. My guitar has always been my living.”

He started taking lessons when he was 8 with Odie Palmer, a local guitar legend who once played in Patsy Kline’s band.

“I loved it and started working hard at it. I still practice daily,” Palladino says. “Odie was going back on the road with another country singer, and I wound up taking all his students for him. That’s how I got into teaching. I was 18; started teaching right out of high school.”

He spent time studying accounting at Hagerstown Community College but, “I knew after two years that wasn’t what I wanted to do.”

As his career progressed, Palladino was fortunate to take a few lessons from Danny Gatton, who guitar manufacturer Gibson ranks as the 27th greatest guitar player of all time.

As a teacher, Palladino has touched hundreds of guitar players, including Grammy-nominated Billy Alexander. But his first love is playing and over the years Palladino has shared the stage with blues greats like Joe Bonnamassa, Walter Trout, and Deb Callahan and played in Hagerstown with The Coasters, The Platters, and Sammy Kershaw. With the Rhythm Kings Palladino made a number of appearances at the popular Western Maryland Blues Festival.

This month Palladino turns 70 and shows no signs of slowing down. “As long as I can get people to come see me and the clubs keep booking me, I’ll keep playing,” he says. “At this point in my life, I’m just going to teach and play until I can’t do it anymore.”