Mark Allan Atwood - artist bio

---

A seventh generation Texan, descended from settlers of Ellis County, Mark Allan Atwood has been sharing his stories and songs all across Texas since the summer of 1980, when as a "songwriter music" obsessed 18 yr old from Ennis, he began showing up at north Texas songwriter nights.The songs of Kristofferson, BW Stevenson, James Taylor, Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne, and many more, had captured his imagination, as a kid listening to his mom's vinyl, and they formed his early understanding of what he wanted to say musically, and how to say it. Hanging around the songwriter haunts of the Dallas folkie scene, and Lower Greenville Avenue's nightlife, he began to watch, listen, and learn from a community of gifted song tellers. 

He's a 4-time Texas Music Awards TMA recipient (Rising Star 2010, Founder's Award 2011, Male Vocalist 2013, and Live Artist of the Year 2014). Atwood has also scored a handful of regional Texas radio successes from his 5 full-length albums of original work, the award winning debut How Country in 2009, the Atwood-Childs duo album Trading Pains in 2010, two Adam Odor produced albums with Mark Allan Atwood & Brimstone, Burned At The Crossroads and Alive & Well 2012 and 2013 respectively, and the latest, Old Scars & Sandbars, in March of 2023. His songs "Happy Thoughts" and "Pedal Down Life," from Old Scars, were popular singles, reaching new heights of radio spins and streaming numbers, in Texas and beyond.

A resident of what he refers to as "Almost Mexico" (South Padre Island), for the last nine years, and after playing well over a thousand shows to island tourists and visitors from across the U.S., Atwood has been back on the roadways across Texas and Oklahoma since the summer of 2022, sharing stories  of love and loss, of right and wrong, and the occasional bit of poetry about bugs.