“He’s blessed with crystalline fingerpicking, a resonant baritone, and a writer’s ear.” —The Oregonian

Andrew Calhoun's innovative music is rooted in tradition. In fifty years as a performer he has cultivated a prismatic repertoire including his poetic original songs, Irish and American folk songs, Anglo-Scottish ballads, folk spirituals, and poems and songs by writers such as Dave Carter, Mary Oliver and Robert Burns.

At age seven, Andrew Calhoun memorized W. B. Yeats' "Song of Wandering Aengus," thus earning a nickel from his mother. He got his first guitar in 1967 at the age of ten, and began writing songs at twelve. By the late seventies, he was performing in the Chicago folk scene. Six months of janitorial work funded a trip to Europe in 1977 leading him to hear a guiding musical inspiration, Martin Carthy, at the Cambridge Folk Festival in England. He has since toured internationally, performing at folk clubs and festivals, pubs and house concerts. In 1992, Calhoun founded Waterbug Records, an artists' cooperative folk label which grew to 130 titles before closing in 2019,. His own recordings have been released on Hogeye, Flying Fish and Waterbug Records. He has self-published two books of poetry, Twenty-Four Poems and Hay, a comedy book, The Trilogy Trilogy; Warlock Rhymer: An English Translation of Robert Burns' Scots Poems was published by Artemis Press in 2017.

"Rhymer’s Tower: Ballads of the Anglo-Scottish Border", a double CD, was released in 2017. A duo recording with his daughter Casey Calhoun, "Skeins", was released in 2018. Calhoun wrote and produced The Liberty Lines, a historical program illustrating how the Underground Railroad spurred the Civil War, weaving Black spirituals with primary source quotations from James Pennington, Harriet Tubman, Thomas W. Higginson, Frederick Douglass, Emily Dickinson and Abraham Lincoln. This was produced at The Maple Street Chapel in Lombard, IL, and at the Levy Center in Evanston, IL, in 2019. For the last eight years, Andrew has been working on a Robert Burns songbook involving new research into Burns’ source melodies and early drafts. "Different Now", a new recording of twenty original songs, will be released in 2024.

2012 – Lantern Bearer Award, Folk Alliance Region Midwest
2014 – Lifetime Achievement Award, Woodstock Folk Festival


Visit:
https://andrewcalhoun.com