If you close your eyes and listen to the voice and virtuoso banjo playing, I am sure you’d visualise Sam Amidon as an older and more ragged individual. A modern-day Dock Boggs perhaps.
Instead, as you’ll see in this quirky video, he’s clean-cut and far younger than he sounds. The track – As I Roved Out – is from his excellent new album, Bright Sunny South, which I had the pleasure to review for Whisperin’ & Hollerin’.
Amidon was born less than 25 years ago into a music loving family in Brattleboro, Vermont (where the New Weird America genre took root after Matt Valentine’s free-folk festival).
His music has gradually evolved to embrace British influences, thanks in part to his marriage to Beth Orton.
All his songs are covers of old and new tunes but he adapts these so radically they could pass as his own.
The new album shows that he’s an artist brimful of talent and brimming in confidence.
