americana

Fairfield, a street musician who plays banjo, fiddle, and guitar and sings traditional folk songs as you would imagine they were sung when they were first written, is only just getting used to the idea of playing music venues alongside rock musicians. He is also an avid collector of 78 rpm recordings of American folk and mountain music and is working on plans to build his own spring motor gramophones.

William Elliott Whitmore (born 1978) is an American blues singer and musician from Lee County, Iowa. He has recorded a number of albums released on Southern Records, and now is a member of the Anti Records family. His act consists mostly of playing the banjo or guitar while singing, though on occasion he performs a cappella. He has earned much acclaim from the folk, blues and alt-country communities

Michelle Shocked is a traveller, a troubadour, a 'picker-poet', as they say in Texas. As a young feminist, she left Texas to travel, Kerouac-style, and was caught up in Reagan-era grassroots politics. Her musical career was ignited by a bootleg recording made around a Kerrville Folk Festival campfire on a Sony walkman. Released in England as ‘The Texas Campfire Tapes’ without Shocked’s authority, its success abroad enticed Mercury Records to offer the newcomer a recording contract.

The day before his senior year as a playwright student at the University of North Carolina, Joe Pug sat down for a cup of coffee and had the clearest thought of his life: I am profoundly unhappy here. Then came the second clearest. Pug packed up his belongings and drove the longest route possible to Chicago. Working as a carpenter by day, the 23 year-old Pug spent nights playing the guitar he hadn't picked up since his teenage years.