Much of Amidon’s material is adventurous reworkings of traditional American ballads, hymns and work songs. With his fiddle, guitar and banjo in tow, he will stop at the Herndon Gallery at Antioch College on March 24. The solo show is presented by the Foundry Theater, temporarily closed due to repairs.
Amidon was raised by folk musicians. His parents were deeply committed to the tradition, though they were far less interested in the image of a lone performer with a guitar onstage — the role their son has now occupied across seven-plus acclaimed albums — than in community music-making: group harmonies, tune sessions and the idea that music belongs to everyone.
“My parents were really great educators and community singing leaders,” Amidon said. “Their whole life blood was folk music, but they were very, very open-minded and curious about music. We were always discussing music at dinner.”
His dad would periodically take him to experimental concerts, which would later open up Amidon’s mind to noise improvisers and free jazz players like John Coltrane and Albert Ayler. He was also into Yo La Tengo, Nirvana and Jimi Hendrix. But when he was first learning guitar, he began with the folk songs his parents played.
“That’s when I realized folk songs could become a platform for improvisation with all these different musicians in this other world I loved,” Amidon said. “That was the eureka moment when I was about 25, when those two worlds of my different interests came back together.”
Most of Amidon’s albums are built around reworked folk songs. But the process of getting there is often accidental — it’s not until after he’s done writing and humming the parts that he sees the connections to folk. His 2025 record “Salt River” features three non-folk covers: “Ask the Elephant!” by Yoko Ono; “Big Sky” by Lou Reed; and “Friends and Neighbors” by Ornette Coleman.
“I was thinking about a more explicit connection between these older experimental punk and jazz legends, the old masters, in the same way you might learn a fiddle tune from an old 80-year-old fiddle player,” Amidon said. “The connection between experimental music and folk music is community and improvisation.”
He describes the relationship between the seemingly disparate genres this way: In traditional music, you walk into a room with somebody you don’t necessarily know and you make music with them immediately. In noise and experimental music, you play what you feel with a similar group of players.
“My goal is to find folk songs anywhere,” he said. “To make everything into a folk song.”
Amidon has recorded or performed as a guest artist with musicians Bon Iver, The National, Marc Ribot, Beth Orton and more.
He doesn’t claim his records as traditional folk records; he openly changes the music and collaborates with people with no background in the genre — musicians who come from free jazz or classical or indie rock. He recognizes that the albums do sound like folk to most people. But folk, to him, is much stricter and more personal.
“One of the beautiful things about folk music is there’s tons of people doing it,” he said. “American folk music is at no risk of dying out. I don’t feel I have to think about the question of continuation any more than if I was playing experimental electronic music or indie rock. It’s just as alive in the world as any of those other worlds.”
HOW TO GO
What: Sam Amidon
When: 7 p.m. March 24
Where: Herndon Gallery at Antioch College, South Hall, 805 Livermore St., Yellow Springs
Cost: $25 general admission / $5 student admission
Tickets: antiochcollege.edu
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