Two Way Street Coffee House Presents – Andrew Calhoun

On Friday, June 24, 2022 Two Way Street Coffee House Friday Night Concert Series presents Andrew Calhoun.

Andrew Calhoun’s innovative music is rooted in tradition. In over forty 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. “You can’t understand folk music without studying history, and vice versa,” Calhoun says.

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, bringing some of the brightest singer-songwriters and folk musicians to an international audience. 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 involving several years of research, was released in 2017. Calhoun works solo and in a duo with his daughter Casey Calhoun; their first recording, Skeins, was released in 2018. Andrew is working on a Robert Burns songbook involving new research into the source melodies for Burns songs.

If you can’t join us in person, you can still tune in virtually to catch the show! Make your donation HERE to Andrew. Visit www.twowaystreet.org for more information.

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