The Foghorn Stringband
Feeling the Joy Of Playing Together Again
Photo by Sandlin Gaither
It was March 2020. (Cue ominous music.) The Foghorn Stringband was looking forward to their East Coast tour. Reeb Willms and Caleb Klauder were flying in from Portland West (Oregon); Nadine Landry and Sammy Lind were flying in from Quebec.
Nadine: “We were starting the tour in Washington, D.C. Got there super late. Met up with Caleb and Reeb. Partied the whole night. Got up the next morning to like 935 million emails about the tour being canceled.”
Up till then, nobody had been taking the new COVID scare seriously. The friend who was putting them up was saying, “You can stay here for six weeks, I’ve got plenty of toilet paper!” Then, the next day it was, “If I were you, I’d totally try to get home.”
Nadine was trying. She’d been on the phone with Air Canada for three hours. She and Sammy finally made it. Then, like everybody else, they were quarantined. No touring. No work. Their three-week tour to Ireland? Canceled.
She says, “I remember one morning I was really sad about everything that was happening. And Sammy just held me and said, ‘Don’t worry. It’s only gonna get worse.’” Sammy was right. It did get worse. But, as Frank Wakefield says, “That was now…this is then.”
Two long years later, Foghorn (as they are respectfully called by their legions of friends and followers) is back on the road and, as Nadine says, “Just feeling the joy of playing together again.” I saw one of their first after-COVID shows in Washington, D.C. Later, while talking to Sammy and Nadine, I said, “You sounded as good as ever and that is freaky.” Nadine said, “It freaked us out too!” Sammy added, “We were throwing in new tunes and songs at each other, left and right, more than ever. On stage. Like, ‘I wrote this new song, it’s in F, you guys want to try it?’ Going for it and our ears being so open.”
What makes a band so tight that they can pick up right where they left off after two years of being 3000 miles apart? For starters, Sammy, on fiddle and banjo, and Caleb, on mandolin, fiddle, and guitar, have been performing together since 2000, when the first version of the Foghorn Stringband emerged. But both of them were deep into old-time music before that.
Caleb, who was raised primarily on Orcas Island, Washington, had already spent ten years playing guitar and mandolin with Calobo, a folk-rock group he had started with a friend in 1991 to showcase their original songs. As Caleb says, “I’ve been a songwriter my whole life.” The band released five albums and toured nationally but broke up in 2001. Caleb’s first solo album, Sings Out (2000), was released during this time. By the time Calobo broke up, Caleb was also playing mandolin with Pig Iron, an old-time string band from Portland with Taylor Grover on the banjo. They released one album, Fill Me Up, in 1999.
Pig Iron is where Sammy makes his entrance into the Foghorn Story. Sammy had come west from Minnesota to attend Lewis and Clark College in Portland in the fall of 1996. He had spent his high school years playing guitar in a rock band (“I still like that stuff,” he says) but change was in the wind. His brother Eric had discovered old-time music. When Sammy went home that summer, Eric said, “You’ve got to get one of these!” So Sammy bought an open-back banjo. He took it to the Minnesota Bluegrass and Old-Time Music Association summer festival where he realized, “I want to do this the rest of my life.” He also got a fiddle and, as he says, “That’s all I did.”
Back in Portland that fall, Sammy went immediately to a music shop and asked, “Where’s the old-time music?” Thus, he met Pig Iron, with Taylor Grover but not yet Caleb. He would jam with them on banjo and guitar, but the fiddle was “just something I would always play by myself.” Sammy was never officially in Pig Iron but did fill in on banjo and guitar.
After a year studying in Germany, Sammy came back to Portland for his last college term, graduating in 2000, just in time to attend the Old Time Fiddler’s Convention in Weiser, Idaho, with Caleb and Taylor. There the group that was initially called Foghorn Leghorn came together with Brian Bagdonas on bass. Jessie Withers joined on guitar in the fall of the year but he was replaced in the spring of 2002 by Kevin Sandri.
This original lineup of Sammy, Caleb, Taylor, Brian, and Kevin, now called the Foghorn Stringband, released four albums in five years: Rattlesnake Tidal Wave (2002), Reap What You Sow (2004), Weiser Sunrise (2005) and Boombox Square Dance (2007). Except for the all-instrumental Boombox Square Dance, all these projects have a healthy dose of vocals, mostly duets usually done by Caleb and Sammy. Foghorn also spent the summer of 2004 touring with Dirk Powell and Riley Baugus and recorded one cut on Dirk’s album Time Again (2004).
The liner notes on Boombox provide a taste of the band’s irreverent sense of humor: “All these tunes are from the same recording sessions that went into Reap What You Sow…Imagine a sow that has a huge litter, uncontrollable, little blind mute piglets all over the floor. Each one is special, yes, but we just didn’t have space for them all…I know food metaphors are cliché in old-time music, and so are pigs, but this recording is old-school that way…It should be on a cassette.”
But Foghorn was not exactly a traditional old-time string band from the beginning. Caleb says, “You know Foghorn was a funny band at that point. Here’s a guy like me playing mandolin. I love bluegrass music. I love singing. I love country, and I was getting into the fiddle and old-time music. But you know how it is. People have sort of separated them for so long. Bluegrass is three-finger banjo and mandolin. Old-time is clawhammer banjo and fiddle and no mandolin. And no breaks. We’re aware of all that. But I was also naïve enough and young enough and didn’t care enough to have those limitations. And even though we respected all that stuff, we were totally willing to break rules for the joy of music.”
But band lineups don’t last forever and when the forces of life started pulling the original Foghorns in different directions, Sammy and Caleb often performed as the Foghorn Duo. This was easy because, for years, they had played weekly at a winery near Portland using every combination of instruments possible to them. They’d sing Carter Family songs all night long. The Foghorn Duo released one CD, Lonesome Song (2009)—recorded in one day in the studio—with eight vocals and seven instrumentals.
But Caleb still needed an outlet for his original songs and a way to express his deep love for early country music, so around this time Caleb’s big country band surfaces with two albums, Dangerous Me’s and Poisonous You’s (2007) and Western Country (2010). This aggregation included pedal steel, electric guitar, piano, and drums, along with mandolin and fiddle. Sammy played and sang on both of these.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the continent, Nadine Landry had been living her own musical life, growing up in Eastern Quebec in a family full of musicians. Her grandmother was fiddle player as were seven of her grandmother’s siblings. This grandmother taught all her kids to play guitar or piano so family gatherings were filled with singing and dancing. Nadine, who had always been a singer, started playing guitar when she was eleven. Once, when a friend complained about having to go to a family party, Nadine was mystified. “You’re gonna sing and dance and play music!” Her friend said, “No, we’re gonna talk about politics.” Nadine was stunned. She thought all families played music!
After graduating from college in 1999, Nadine traveled to the Yukon, 4000 miles away, to visit her aunt. She “fell in love with the place,” and her two-week trip turned into a seventeen-year residency in Whitehorse. It helped that the Yukon has a big French community because Nadine had grown up speaking French. She began to meet the local musicians, and she and another girl, with guitar and mandolin, began busking on Friday afternoons. Laughing, Nadine says, “The government employees were just getting off work, and we’d make tons of money busking outside the doors of the liquor store! I loved that!”
In 2001, she traveled with friends to the Alaska Folk Festival in Juneau. Here she met “this insane community of really amazing players. I knew two bluegrass songs, and I sang them over and over. And my voice was super loud, so it was like ‘Hey, check out this girl!’ It was really funny because of speaking French and having a way bigger accent than I have now.”
Nadine loved the music she heard—Irish, Cajun, country, honky-tonk, western—and the festival became a “meter” for her own musical progress: “The first year, I knew two songs. The year after I knew twenty!” It was here that she saw the Foghorn Stringband for the first time. “It was mind exploding when I saw Foghorn. I’d just gotten a bass that year, 2003, and I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, if I one day get to jam with those people, I’d be so stoked.’ I was like a mega fan.”
She would get her wish but first, she and her bass would join fiddler Jenny Lester’s Hungry Hill bluegrass band and record the CD Ride with them in 2007. Then in 2008 Nadine wanted to go to Alaska’s Pelican Boardwalk Boogie festival. Getting there, however, proved to be a problem because the friends she was planning to ride with had no room. Nadine said, “No, you don’t understand. My life’s about to change. You have to take me.” Her friends said, “Well, that’s a great story but we can’t take you. There’s no physical room in the car for you.” Then, around 4 a.m., on the day her friends were leaving for Pelican, the fiddle player, who was pregnant, backed out, so suddenly there was a spot for Nadine. And like the song says, her “grip was packed to travel and she was scratching gravel.”
In Pelican she finally got to meet Sammy who was playing with a “thrown together version of Foghorn” with just Caleb and Taylor Grover. But when Foghorn got up to play a bar set, Taylor played one song and the hand he’d been having problems with gave out. Luckily Nadine was out on the floor dancing, and since they had jammed a little bit earlier, the Foghorns collectively said, “Get up here.”
Nadine played guitar for three hours with them—and she and Sammy have been together ever since. She spent a lot of time playing with Foghorn that summer, when she wasn’t touring with Hungry Hill, and Foghorn officially began touring as a trio in 2009. The Foghorn Trio recorded one CD, Sud de la Louisiane, in October 2010, which featured Nadine singing the title cut in French. Nadine and Sammy also released a duo CD, Granddad’s Favorite (2010), spotlighting Sammy’s fiddle playing and their own exquisite duet singing.
Even with Nadine in the band, the core sound of Foghorn—mandolin, fiddle, and duet singing—stayed remarkably the same. Still, she brought some subtle changes. Their set list now included Cajun and bluegrass songs along with the occasional trio. In addition, her strong, high voice allowed them to create the heart-wrenching sound of a high female lead with the male harmony stacked below, a la Dolly and Porter.
During these years, Reeb Willms, a guitar player and “super shy singer” from Washington State, had been busy following her own musical path. She had grown up hearing her dad and uncles play and sing as the Willms Brothers and had played piano as a youngster. She started strumming guitar in her early twenties because she wanted to back herself up singing. But, as she says, “I couldn’t sing in front of anybody. I had to be totally alone to sing.”
That would change when she went to Western Washington University in Bellingham. Here she made friends with some students who played old-time music. “When they found out I played guitar, they said, ‘Here’s what you do. You play boom, chuck, and here’s where you change chords.’” When they started playing at the Farmer’s Market, they asked her to join them. At first she only played guitar. “I couldn’t sing out. Then, I think I got the hang of it.” She would become a founding member of two Washington old-time bands, the Shadies and the Country Messengers, and like many musicians in the Northwest, she was a Foghorn fan long before she met the band. Then, around 2008, she too went to Weiser. “Foghorn was over at the Foghorn tree where they camped every year. I was walking across the field and my friend Andy was sitting with the Foghorns, and he said ‘Hey, Reeb, come over here and sing a song!’ I was a little nervous because I knew I was going to meet the Foghorns. But I went over and sang a song and ended up playing tunes for quite a while.”
Caleb adds, “I had just gotten up from the circle to go get a drink and all I heard was her voice behind me. I wondered, ‘Who’s that person?’ So I turned around and it was her singing. I knew instantly, ‘That’s how I want to sing with women. We could sing together.’ To me it was her simple approach to the clarity of the note and the unadornment—not that you don’t want to adorn anything—but in general the purity of the note and the humbleness of the song. That’s how I want to sing.”
Caleb and Reeb made a point to sing again that weekend, but didn’t stay in close touch afterwards. However, at the next Weiser, they jammed and Caleb recognized that Reeb was also a “powerhouse guitar player with good solid drive.” Soon they were dating. And as Caleb says, “I wanted to be able to play music with Reeb as much as I did with Sammy and Nadine.” But before Reeb joined Foghorn, she and Caleb laid down tracks for Oh Do You Remember, a duet CD of “obscure country songs,” in March of 2011. The liner notes called them, “Two young bodies with old souls singing in pure rich voices of another time.”
As it turned out, Reeb had been “ready for a change” in her life. After graduating from college in 2006 she had worked on a farm for a few years, and she was working for a seed company when the Foghorns asked her to join the band in the fall of 2011. To her, “the idea of being able to play music full on seemed really appealing. I remember thinking about it pretty carefully and thinking I would regret it if I didn’t do this. Because the caliber of music that Foghorn was making was really special and it just seemed like too good an opportunity to pass up.”
The band didn’t waste any time making an album with Reeb. In 2012 they released Outshine The Sun, recording it “live by the woodstove.” With Reeb on board, the group now included four strong singers. Caleb still did most of the lead singing but the vocal combinations were even more varied and included five trios. Still, the group’s favorite vocal medium would remain duets. Caleb loves the “flexibility” of duos while Reeb loves the “simplicity of the two voices.” Reeb and Nadine’s strong duet often draws on songs from other female singers including Hazel and Alice, Laurel Bliss, and the Carter Family. Their next two albums, Devil In The Seat (2015) and Rock Island Grange (2017) would continue Foghorn’s pattern of showcasing driving old-time fiddle tunes along with duet singing in almost every possible combination.
In the midst of all these Foghorn projects, Caleb and Reeb also found time to record another duo album, Innocent Road (2016), with Caleb’s country band. Again, the recording provided an outlet for Caleb’s originals along with country classics like “Jump The Mississippi.” They also recorded the CD Farewell, Alligator Man: A Tribute To The Music Of Jimmy C. Newman (2017) with Joel Savoy and Kelli Jones, their last project to date.
In addition to all their recording, Foghorn is constantly touring. They have performed all over the United States, including Alaska and Hawaii, and have toured in Ireland, the United Kingdom, France, Switzerland, Germany, Norway, and Australia. Caleb explains, “We didn’t really have tours. We’d just always be gigging and sometimes we’d go home. That’s when the tour ended. Then you’d go back out again.”
This year things are finally getting back to normal. Sammy and Nadine have another duo album ready for release soon, and the album they recorded with Irish accordion player Johnny B. Connolly should be out this spring. Caleb and Reeb will shortly be releasing some original songs they have recorded with Mike Bub on bass, Russ Blake on Steel, Joel Savoy on fiddle, and Chris Scruggs on guitar. Nadine and Sammy have been touring as a duo in Quebec and New Brunswick, while Reeb and Caleb have been performing together with their country band around the United States. The entire group will head back east in late March, to teach again at the Floyd County Old-Time Get-Together in Virginia. And in May the Foghorns will finally get to make that long-delayed trip to Scotland and Ireland! Then in June, they will circle back to where it all began, in Weiser, to do what they love best: play and sing old-time tunes all night long just for the pure joy of the music.
