John Shreve was raised in St. Joseph, Missouri. Every summer the family traveled to the West, to Colorado, the Yellowstone region, Montana and the Northwest Pacific coast. In 1968-1969, he spent a year as a foreign exchange student in Germany.Throughout the 1970s, he divided his time between Montana and Europe, living in West Germany, Sweden and France. John met his future wife in East Berlin in 1977. Until 1983, he regularly traveled between West and East Berlin until his wife and daughter were allowed to emigrate. In 1989, he got his Ph.D. in German literature at the Free University in West Berlin. His dissertation about the songwriter and poet Wolf Biermann appeared in book form as Nur wer sich ändert, bleibt sich treu. He later published a history of a small German village from the state of Brandenburg, Reetz. Ein Dorf in der Brandtsheide.
The earliest musical influence was his grandfather, Ralph Layson, a Free Methodist lay preacher who sang religious songs. John´s mother, Kay Shreve, is also a singer (you can hear her sing at the bonus track of this CD!) In elementary school, folk songs were sung and John was strongly influenced by the recordings of Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, Utah Phillips and Si Kahn. Nevertheless, he did not begin singing until he was in his early forties. He recorded a collection of old and new folk songs, Thinking of Home, which is available as a music cassette. His most recent recording, From Texas to Montana, is a collection of songs, poems and instrumentals about the American West.