We’re out on tour with the Foghorn Stringband, but we get home soon and we’ll be hosting a harmony singing workshop on Nov. 12. And another Stringband class, date TBD. The Yukon Woodshed website has added a “Nadine and Sammy sessions” page to their website to promote all the workshops we’ll be hosting in the future, take a moment to visit their website and sign up to receive the latest news on these sessions!
Also from November 14-25, we will be performing the Big Horn’s Home Routes circuit in Northern Alberta! Click on the town you’re interested to attend a concert and fill out the info to RSVP. Home Routes is a great Canadian organization dispatching dozens of artists across the country for a series of house concerts. People from Yukon all the way to Nova Scotia open their homes to music lovers and artists perform in the coziness of a living room. The ambiance is great, prone to storytelling, anecdotes, more so than if performed in a bar. Give it a try, it’s delightful!
Here we are in San Francisco, CA about to start a tour with our friends Jesse Lege, Joel Savoy and Cajun Country Revival! We’ll be a week in California, then up to Washington and Oregon before heading to Europe with Foghorn Stringband to play the Roskilde Festival in Denmark, the Gooikoorts festival in Belgium and the Nääsville Bluegrass festival in Sweden with a bunch of other stuff in The Netherlands and Sweden. Check our schedule at www.foghornstringband.com
We’re also super excited to be more present in the Yukon and play locally. So far we participated at the Woodshed: Yukon Acoustic Music Workshops at the beautiful Sun Dog Retreat and played at the Kluane Mountain Bluegrass Festival in Haines Junction! We’ll be at Arts in Park on July 22nd and Cafe Balzam (Takhini Hot Springs) on July 23rd and August 13th. We’re also absolutely thrilled to have our Louisiana friends come to Whitehorse to play the Wharf by the Old Fire Hall on August 7th.
We’re hoping to set up workshops in the fall in Haines Junction, in Whitehorse and in the French classes of the Yukon Schools! Keep your eyes open for any events on this website or around town.
New very cool things are sprouting and developing in Whitehorse and we’re thrilled to be part of it! Did you get a chance to visit the new music shop Hamilton and Son Guitar Works? They have gorgeous instruments and really good coffee! Check it out, on 3rd Avenue between Alexander and Black!
Feel free to email us landry.nadine (at) gmail.com or stephensammylind (at) gmail.com for more informations, lessons, etc.
Hey everybody! Sammy here writing from our home in beautiful Whitehorse, Yukon! I finally got my Canadian Residency and followed Nadine up to Whitehorse, where she has called home since 2000. After many visits over the years and many longings to be here when not on tour, I decided to call Whitehorse home as well. I love it. It’s a small town full of inspiring, great folks from all walks-of-life, overwhelming outdoor adventures and crisp, bright days. Come visit!
The Foghorn Stringband has been busier than ever. We completed our 8th album, “Devil in the Seat“. We’re so excited about it and have already done two tours this year in the States to promote it. We all met up in late January to do a two-week Pacific Northwest run, starting on Vancouver Island, British Columbia and finishing up at the wonderful Oly Old Time Festival . In March we met up in Brooklyn, NY at The Jalopy Theater and School of Music to start another fantastic tour, finishing in Southampton, MA at the Parlor Room. We had such an amazing tour, playing in Montpelier, VT for a square dance, workshops, and a show- that’s an amazing music community right there! Thanks to the Summit School. We also played an amazing square dance in Boston and a sold out show there at Club Passim!! We are really looking forward to playing two shows back at Club Passim http://passim.org on September 2nd as well as even sooner, on May 25th at the legendary Irish pub, The Burren in the front bar. Yeah, Boston!! We also had a lovely time in Maine, Rhode Island, Albany, NY and New Jersey. Check out Foghorn’s website for more details as well as more info about our upcoming tour of Ireland, Scotland, and England! We hope to see you there somewhere!
2014 Recap
2014 was an action-packed year for us for sure. Getting most of my stuff up here to the Yukon seemed rather uneventful compared to some of the music adventures we got to be a part of. I’ll try to re-cap:
The year kicked off with a last “hometown” hang in Portland during the Old Time Gathering, complete with a house-full of friends crashing in every corner of the house. From there we headed to Glasgow to play Celtic Connections with Foghorn and stick around to see a bunch of shows and visit friends outside of Edinburgh and even snuck in a quick visit to Liverpool (sorry about your car, Sarah and Joey…)! The sessions were epic of course, a highlight being tunes with Anna Lindblad (cousin!) and of course our old friends, Sarah McFadyen and Joey Sanderson!
From Scotland we flew straight to Anchorage for the Fiddle Train! The snow wasn’t quite right for skiing like in 2013, but the company, tunes, and the hilarious tune/shananigan-filled train ride was the best! We then met Caleb and Reeb in Minneapolis and started a sweet Midwestern Foghorn tour with The Cactus Blossoms, who we try to play with or just plain listen to whenever we get the chance. You’ll have a hard time finding better harmony singers or nicer fellas anywhere. On that tour we covered a lot of ground, a main stop-off being Folk Alliance in Kansas City. It’s a great place to meet/play for festival promoters and meet up with old friends and have some good sessions. The tour ended in Louisiana for a show with bossman, Dirk Powell, at Parish Ink, and we were in the tidal wave that is, of course, MARDI GRAS! The night before Mardi Gras out at Faquetigue Foghorn played for Lundi Gras in the ice cold weather that continued through the next day. It was “Freezer Gras” for sure! Still fun of course…
The day after Mardi Gras, Nadine and I recorded the second Cajun Country Revival album with Joel Savoy and Jesse Lege called, “Greetings From Louisiana” in Joel’s studio and then headed to China for two weeks with Nick Spitzer, host of the radio show American Routes!! We all had a great adventure playing over there. China is a place I never thought I’d get to visit, let alone go and play there in the first ever cajun band to play at on mainland China! We played in Guangzhou, Harbin, and Shanghai and Nanjing. We were treated so well, and had amazing responses everywhere we played. It was incredibly empowering for the women there to see and hear Nadine play the upright bass and sing the way she does. Folks went nuts and lined up after every show for autographs! We had a little hiccup in our journey over there- the flight attendant on our first flight took our fiddles and guitar off the plane saying they “don’t allow instruments to be in the overhead”, even though they take up much less that people’s huge carry-ons full of whatever unbreakable sh#% !! So the guy lied to us, saying they would be gate-checked and actually made us go to the normal baggage claim, causing us to miss our flight to China and we missed the first gig. Our already checked baggage was, however, on the flight, which caused some problems and it took one week to be reunited with our bags. It was hilarious though- the nice folks up in Harbin at the American Consulate outfitted us with some grey track suits!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZtZPfq1qodIAfter China we enjoyed a relaxing couple of weeks up here in Whitehorse before meeting up in Germany with Caleb and Reeb for a month-long Foghorn tour. It was a blast for me to go back to Germany, having studied there myself in ’98-’99. We all had a great time enjoying the sites, beer and heavy food! From there we flew to London and played a couple of nights before heading to Wales to play at Fire in the Mountain, an incredible festival in Wales we can’t wait to make it back to.
This brought us to summer and we jumped right in, heading to California to play at the Grass Valley Father’s Day Festival, Weiser, Idaho to our favorite sandy lot, Stickerville for a week of pickin’, then a quick trip to Kentucky to play ROMP, teach at Fiddle Tunes, play the Big Horn Mountain Music Festival before heading back to the Yukon for some serious summer action in the North! Woo hoo! Highlights included some great swimming here at Long Lake and a trip to Dawson for the Moosehide Gathering.
We got to travel all the way to Newfoundland to play a The Newfoundland and Labrador Folk Festival and the Woody Point Writer’s Festival with the Cajun country Revival. We loved Newfoundland and are counting the days till we can get back there!! We then flew down to Portland and played a couple gigs with Foghorn before heading to the legendary Tønder Festival in good ol’ Denmark. We had a blast playing with both The Foghorn Stringband and The Cajun Country Revival, as well as hilarious sessions with Dirk, Cedric Watson, Anna Lindblad, Sheesham and Lotus & Son, among others! Woo hoo! We followed this up with a sweet little tour of Sweden and Norway by train.
Then it was time for The Cajun Country Revival to join Pokey LaFarge for his Central Time Tour. We had such a blast and made a bunch of good friends along the way! We finished near St. Louis and met up with Caleb and Reeb to play with Foghorn at the Folk and Roots Festival and then off to IBMA for some of that. Next was some family time in eastern Quebec, a couple of “Nadine and Sammy” gigs and workshops in Toronto, Wolfe Island, and Nadine’s aunt’s lavender farm before heading back to Whitehorse for almost a month at home. We didn’t have the snowfall to do our usual snowshoeing and ski trails, but were able to hike a bunch and enjoy some good northern hang time.
Then it was time to make the 8th Foghorn album, “Devil in the Seat” and what better place than on a small island in the Pacific?!? We’re super happy with how it turned out and finished with time to have a last few chill days on Kauai, HI before flying to Boston to be a part of Christmas Celtic Sojourn for two weeks with Solas, Kevin Burke, Lumiere and some amazing dancers from The Stepcrew. It was a great couple of weeks hanging out in Boston with some amazing people. Thanks to Brian O’Donovan for bringing us there and to he and his wife Lindsay showing us a great time!
From Boston we headed to Nadine’s family up in Quebec for the holidays and brought in the New Year there. It was a great couple of weeks of family time and a time to be together after the passing of Nadine’s grandmother, who brought music into the family. We had many late night jams in her honor!
This brings us back to the start of 2015! We kicked it off in Juneau, playing a couple nights at the Alaskan Hotel with The Cajun Country Revival, then Homer at Alice’s Champaign Palace before playing the Anchorage Folk Festival with both The Cajun Country Revival and Foghorn. Thanks to Cedric Watson for filling in last minute and tearing it up! What a blast!!
Hello there folks! We’ve just finished up an amazing little tour with our band with Jesse Lege, Joel Savoy, and Caleb Klauder called The Cajun Country Revival. We only get a chance to play a few times a year together so we soaked up every second we could with these guys, starting in Washington D.C. last Wednesday and ending up in Knoxville, TN. We had perfect weather, amazing scenery, complete with the fall colors at their peak and
visits with great friends along the way. We can’t wait to come back this way with The Foghorn Stringband in March!
We kicked off the month up in Vancouver, B.C. teaching a weekend-long workshop organized by Canada’s #1 fan of old time music, Linda Parke. Thank you Linda! In the summer of 2011 she held the first of these workshops led by Nadine and me at her family cabin in eastern BC on Lake Pavillion, a crystal clear lake nestled in the mountains there. We planned to return last summer but a fire destroyed much of her camp and we relocated Camp Pavillion to Frank Metcalf’s home in Vancouver. Thanks to Frank and Mary for hosting the workshop and to all of the enthusiastic musicians we got to hang out with. It wasn’t quite the same as being out in the boonies, but the spirit was there and we filled up with tunes and home cooking all weekend.
After Camp Pavillion, we took the ferry over to Vancouver Island for a few days off with our longtime pal Anne Louise Genest. Nadine has known and played music with Anne Louise for years so it was a nice reunion. I have been to BC and ridden those ferries many times but never was it so clear and nice. We played tunes the whole trip and met a whole lot of nice people.
After enjoying Canadian Thanksgiving feast #2 we drove down to Victoria and taught a workshop and played a house concert. Thanks to Kelly Sherwin for her last minute organizing and to the Victoria community for coming out!!
We spent our last night in BC back in Vancouver playing an amazing house concert. Our friends Jason and Pharis Romero happened to be in town so we got them to join us for a few at the end of the show. They know their fiddle tunes that’s for sure! We look forward to a Foghorn tour up there in April!
From there we flew to Edmonton, Alberta and met Caleb and Reeb and we all taught at Northern Bluegrass Circle Music Society. Caleb taught mandolin, I taught fiddle and the girls taught harmony singing. It was a great weekend full of pickin’ and super fun to get to hear and play a bunch with Matt Hotte again and to get to meet his family. Keep an eye out for his sister Kayla!
Now we are in Louisiana where we’ve been resting up and getting ready to go to the Blackpot Music Festival and Cookoff. This will be our fourth time being there and it’s always amazing. Music, food, and dancing! Couldn’t be better!
Welcome to our website! We are part of the Foghorn Stringband, but also play duo shows and collaborations with other people, so we thought it’d be nice to list all our whereabouts!
Coming up later this fall is our 2 month Australia tour. Be sure to check the schedule on where we’ll be down under.
