David Cheney was one of San Diego's most noted flamenco guitarists in the 1960s. "Cheney was sort of a legend," fellow guitarist Yuris Zeltins told the Reader in 1994. "There was this whole aura about him because he had been to Granada with the gypsies. He used to play solo guitar."

Cheney played San Diego venues like Su Casa, the White Whale in Bird Rock, restaurants like Swan Song, and coffeehouses like the Heritage, where Tom Waits was famously associated. "The coffee houses came out of the beatnik days, the bohemians, and Flamenco flourished in those days," Cheney told the Reader in 1975. "You could always go down and get a job in coffee houses if you were a flamenco guitarist because that kind of music is very bohemian, being mostly gypsy, it suits the whole atmosphere. It’s right in there. Every place there’s ever been a coffee house, there’s always been a flamenco guitarist. But they don’t exist any more; there’s no more beatniks, no bums."

Cheney later relocated but still occasionally performed and recorded with other artists into the 1980s.