Jefferson Hamer began his musical career amidst the darkest days of the Bush era, writing protest songs and brushing up on his guitar chops while touring across the vast expanses of the American West. Raised in New England, then settling in the Rocky Mountains, he recorded his first album with regional luminaries such as bassist Ben Kaufmann (YMSB), singer KC Groves (Uncle Earl), and slide guitarist Sally Van Meter. After a three-year stint with country-rock mainstay Great American Taxi, he relocated to New York City and became immersed in the city’s flourishing folk and roots music scene. In 2013 he released his first album of traditional music, The Murphy Beds, a meticulous, self-produced collaboration with Dublin-born musician Eamon O’Leary, revisiting the mystical Irish trad. sounds of the 1970′s. The same year he and songwriter Anais Mitchell released Child Ballads, a reworking of seven English and Scottish Popular Ballads collected in the 19th century by Francis James Child, about which the UK Independent remarked, “The playing is exquisite, the singing vibrant, the arrangements like jewellery. It is absolutely beautiful.”
photo by Jay Sansone