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his musical heroes, to read some of his favourite books. He clearly has a voracious appetite for new ideas and adventures.


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It’s obvious from the point of meet- ing Sam that this wide-eyed wonder and energy in his approach to life is a con- stant. A bright-eyed and tousle-haired young man, he proves garrulous and alert, talking reflectively about his musi- cal journey to date.


Peter and Mary Alice Amidon provid-


ed a particularly fertile formative experi- ence for Sam and his brother Stefan (per- cussionist in The Sweetback Sisters.) Both well-respected New England performers and teachers immersed in community music-making, Peter and Mary Alice were actively involved in avant-garde Bread & Puppet Theatre as well as the shape- singing Word Of Mouth Chorus, which later became Northern Harmony. They had met, in their 20s, in Cambridge, Mas- sachusetts at a folk dance and discovered a shared interest in contra dance, fiddle tunes, sacred harp singing, storytelling, black gospel music and children’s singing games to which they have subsequently dedicated their lives and careers. They were also drawn to English folk song – the likes of The Watersons and The Copper Family – and, along with the likes of American-based English singers Tony Bar- rand and John Roberts, made a decision to create a community of like-minded artists in a new location.


“They both got swept up in the folk revival of the ‘70s. In the US, each decade has its folk revival and each one has a dif- ferent character, different things that peo- ple were excited about. In the ‘30s, it was all about the working man, the socialist thing. In the ‘60s, it was the hippy-circle- of-love-Bob Dylan-singer-with-guitar kind of thing. In the ‘70s, things got more focused on the little different corners of folk music. My parents were not at all interested in being guitar-based singer- songwriters, nor were they even folk club scene people. They were great folk singers in the classic sense – with guitars or banjos – but they chose a path that was more based in community singing. They very consciously moved to Brattleboro, Ver- mont with a number of other ‘folky/hippy’ people of their age who were also starting to settle down and have kids, and they cre- ated this community.”


For Sam, folk music and community was just part of the fabric of his life, involving a lot of sacred harp singing, con- tra dances, folk music camps in the sum- mer, particularly Pinewoods Folk Music Camp. All this while, Sam joined in the family pursuit of community singing with his parents and as part of Northern Har- mony, which involved extensive touring, including to England. When Sam’s voice started dropping, he stopped singing as a soloist. But, being grafted onto such a hefty musical rootstock, Sam had already begun to grow his own way at a very young age.


“I started playing the fiddle when I


was three. New England fiddle music, I quickly realised, was a few Irish tunes, a few French Canadian tunes and a few old time American tunes, all played in the same style. It’s a great style but, by the time I was 11, I really realised that it was


hat also shines through is Sam’s buzz about what’s out there: the liner notes are filled with exhorta- tions to listen to some of


the Irish tunes that I was into. I really got obsessive about that. I had some wonder- ful teachers – New England fiddlers – and I would pick out which Irish tunes they knew. They weren’t necessarily specialists in that style but they would know a lot about it. Through high school, my entire identity was as a fiddle player. It was what I took pride in. We came to England when I was 13. I remember taking a fid- dle workshop at Sidmouth; that’s when we met and did a show with The Water- sons. Eliza and I played a fiddle tune together and I was totally psyched ‘cos I loved her music.“


On a later trip across the pond, Sam did a Folkworks tour with his parents in the north east, and then went to Ireland, seeking out his hero Tommy Peoples with whom he shared a tune or two on his 15th birthday. Back in Vermont, throughout his high school years, Sam continued to dedi- cate himself to the fiddle.


“I formed a band called Popcorn Behaviour with my best friend, Thomas Bartlett, who I’d been playing folk music with since I was seven. He played piano and I played fiddle and my little brother Stefan played percussion. When we were 13, we put out our first cassette and put out albums all through high school. We were basically a contra dance band and we played at folk festivals all over the country and did gigs a couple of times a month. That was my first intense creative musical experience putting out those records and playing those gigs. I also subbed a bit. My favourite band was a band called Wild Asparagus, an amazing contra dance band. When I was 16, I started to play with them as a guest. Nightingale were great too. These were the best of that genre, really rhythmic. They took beautiful open tuning guitar style behind Irish tunes, super driving. I loved it. That was my world… total immersion in that.”


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Around him were a network of young players who would go on to forge their own way in traditional music, the likes of Uncle Earl and Crooked Still. “Rayna [Gellert] was the soundman for Popcorn Behaviour at one of the folk festivals we played when I was 16 and she was already a great old-time fiddler then. Corey [DiMario], the bass player of Crooked Still, used to play in a lot of the same folk dance bands as me.”


ut despite this immersion in folk music, it wasn’t the only facet to Sam’s early musical experience: “The reality is that my parents were not at all


purists. We loved straight up old-time tunes but my dad had been a composi- tion major in college, and my parents loved all sorts of music. Like Talking Heads. We’d put that on to clean the house. My dad would take me to see a free jazz concert if it came to town. He gave me Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew when I was young. With Thomas and my other friends, we were always going to the record store and buying stuff and debat- ing it like you do at that age. At home, we would constantly have adults to con- verse with about music. Anything was fair game to put on the stereo in the house. My mother was incredibly patient with the amount of screaming saxophone or free jazz or indie rock or whatever it was that we were super into at the time. She would express her opinion for sure, but she was patient… I’m not sure that I’ll be that tolerant.”


There was a latent niggle for Sam


however. A niggle that there was a whole world of music out there, music that he was listening to but that he didn’t have any interaction with as a player. As a result of the catholic range of interest at home, his listening tastes were very broad – from late ’90s indie (Cat Power or Beth Orton) to downtown New York music heroes like Arto Lindsay, guitarist Mark Ribot or blues songwriter/guitar player Chris Whitley. He is also an keen free jazz fan, once deciding to listen to all of the John Coltrane CDs he owned on a ten hour train trip from Brattle boro to Washington DC. He became frustrated that, for him, the likes of Bill Frisell only existed on CD liner notes.


“There was such a discrepancy between my experience of music as a lis- tener and as a player. As a listener it was so broad, as a player it was so specific.”


This musical curiosity and ambition is one that obviously drives him to this day. At the time, the solution was a move to New York to find a balance. So, at the age of 20, he moved to the city. Folk music still played its part, earning him a bit of money teaching fiddle and playing in late-night Irish pub sessions, particularly in a trio with fellow Popcorn Behaviour guitar player Keith Murphy and piper Isaac Alderson. However, his choice to relocate was driven primarily by a desire to try and play differ- ent kinds of music and that meant a differ- ent approach to life, including getting a ‘proper job’ as a 120-word a minute typist and transcriber, a skill he had picked up on long road trips as a child with only Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing on his computer for entertainment!


“I had been making a fully-fledged liv- ing as a musician since I was a teenager, as a fiddle player. At college, at weekends I was often flying off to gigs. When I came to New York and started to play all these other types of music, I realised I had to stop relying on music as an income source, so that I’d only be ticking the criterion for taking a gig ‘cos it was going be interest- ing. There was a life lesson here: in order to become a musician again, in this new way, I had to divorce myself from the iden- tity of being a musician who does that exclusively. It was quite freeing to not be a professional musician because, for the first time since I was 10 or 11, I didn’t ask how much I was going to get paid for a gig beforehand. There’s an irony, in that the folk scene has been created as an anti- commercial thing. Everybody does their own gigs, tries to cut out the middleman as much as possible, puts on gigs where artists get most of the profit, promoters just covering themselves. That’s all very real and true but it can make you sort of money-obsessed, just out of necessity. It’s also ironic ‘cos I’m now broke… and a full- time musician again!”


As well as getting to go to three or four gigs per week, Sam also started col- laborating with other players. He started with childhood friend, Thomas Bartlett, who had moved to the city at roughly the same time. As well as being a very in- demand session keyboardist with differ- ent rock musicians, Thomas was creating his own song-based, indie-rock project as Doveman.


“Doveman was the first time I had ever consciously played something other than folk. I played banjo because he wanted a strumming instrument and I didn’t know how to play guitar. The thing about claw-hammer banjo, old-time


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