John Shreve was born and raised in St. Joseph, Missouri. In 1968-1969, he spent a year as a foreign exchange student in Germany, attending school in Weilburg/Lahn. But he spent little time in school, preferring to hitchhike through most of Western Europe.
After finishing high school in St. Joseph, he attended the University of Montana in Missoula, Montana, initially studying history. It was a time of political upheaval and protest against the war in Vietnam and for John Shreve it was a politically formative period. Today, he is a member of Democrats Abroad as well as the German Social Democratic Party.
Throughout the 1970s, he divided his time between Montana and Europe, living in West Germany, Sweden and France. He received a bachelor's and a master's degree in German from the University of Montana and also attended Philipps University in Marburg in West Germany and, as a Fulbright scholar, the Technical University in West Berlin.
Over the years, John Shreve has worked in a bread factory, in a library, as a printer's assistant, a dishwasher, a street musician, an English teacher, a janitor, a tour guide, a translator, a singer and a writer.
John Shreve met his future wife in East Berlin in 1977. Until 1983, when his wife and daughter were allowed to emigrate, he regularly travelled between West and East Berlin. Soon thereafter, a son was born.
The CIA classified him as a security risk. After the fall of the Wall, he gained access to the files of the East German State Security Service and learned that he had been suspected of espionage. Until his children entered school, he remained at home and took care of them.
The earliest musical influence was his grandfather, Ralph Layson, a Free Methodist lay preacher who sang religious songs. John's mother, Kay Shreve, was also a singer. In elementary school, music instruction consisted largely of singing folk songs.
Later, John Shreve was strongly influenced by the recordings of Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, Utah Phillips and Si Kahn. He recorded a collection of old and new folk songs, Thinking of Home.
In 2004 and 2006, he released the CDs From Texas to Montana and Wild and Windy Places, two collections of songs, poems and instrumentals about the American West.
He followed those with a collection of songs about life, death, faith and the grace of God, Leap of Faith.
John released his fourth CD, Oftimes Do I Think of Thee, a collection of old-time country songs in 2015.
In the following year, he released the mini-CD Who's Gonna Build Your Wall? to oppose the election of Donald Trump as president.
In 2019, John released three limited-edition CDs. Let It Shine is a collection of songs for his grandchildren, but it is certainly more than a children's album.
On Known You of Old, one can hear songs and dances with the Appalachian dulcimer.
Just Beyond Silence is a cycle of unaccompanied songs and texts inspired by the quiet and slowness of the city of Venice.
All profits from these three CDs will go to Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center.
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.
He has also published a number of articles on German history. In 2013, the chronicle of the city of Bad Belzig, Bad Belzig 1910-1921, was published, with a chapter by John on the period of the First World War.
In 2014, he published a history of the home front in rural Germany during the First World War, Kriegszeit. Das ländliche Deutschland 1914-1919.