Andrew Calhoun, an American who has worked as a folk singer, songwriter, poet, author, and record label owner, first surfaced from the Chicago folk scene during the early 1980s. His initial releases on modest regional imprints included Water Street (1983) on Hogeye and Gates of Love (1984) on Flying Fish. During the early 1990s he established the artist-run cooperative Waterbug Records, an outlet that issued his own recordings while also championing and distributing work by other singer-songwriters and folk performers such as Chuck Brodsky and Jonathan Byrd. Beyond his original songs, Calhoun has issued Banks of Sweet Primroses, a 1990 collection of Baroque and classical guitar instrumentals, Telfer's Cows: Folk Ballads of Scotland in 2004, the 2008 set Bound to Go devoted to African-American spirituals, and several volumes of poetry, humor, and English versions of Robert Burns poems.
Born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1957 to a Bell Laboratories technician father and a high-school-teacher mother who regularly supplied him with poetry, Calhoun displayed an early fascination with language; at age seven he committed W.B. Yeats' "Song of Wandering Aengus" to memory in exchange for a nickel. After the family relocated to Naperville, Illinois, in the late 1960s, he acquired guitar instruction from a teenage runaway whom his mother had sheltered. In 1970 his parents took him and his siblings to a Chicago performance by John Prine, after which Calhoun soon began composing his own material. Over the ensuing years he steeped himself in folk traditions by listening to Bob Dylan, Kris Kristofferson, Elizabeth Cotten, Joseph Spence, Ewan MacColl, and Martin Carthy, the last of whom exerted a durable influence on his style. At fifteen he falsely claimed an older age to secure summer employment in a Chicago garment factory, using the wages to purchase a Martin D-28. Once licensed to drive, he spent weekends traveling into the city to perform at folk-club open mikes and to absorb its vibrant scene.
Following an extended period of regional performances, Calhoun launched his recording career with Water Street on the short-lived Evanston, Illinois, label Hogeye in 1982. Throughout the 1980s he maintained a steady touring schedule at festivals, clubs, pubs, and house concerts while issuing two further albums on the established Flying Fish imprint: Gates of Love (1984) and Walk Me to the War (1987). His first poetry collection, Twenty Four Poems, appeared in 1989. By 1990 he had turned substantial attention toward solo guitar repertoire and independently released the cassette Banks of Sweet Primroses containing folk and classical instrumentals. He also briefly partnered with Celtic folk artist Kat Eggleston, resulting in two collaborative albums issued independently at that time. In 1992 Calhoun created the artist-run cooperative folk label Waterbug Records to manage his own output and to assist fellow singer-songwriters and traditional musicians. Since its inception Waterbug has released and distributed recordings by Sloan Wainwright, Dar Williams, Chuck Brodsky, Annie Gallup, Anaïs Mitchell, Erin McKeown, and Devon Sproule, among others. His first album on the label, Hope, arrived in 1993; by the close of the decade he had added Phoenix Envy (1996) and Where Blue Meets Blue (1999).
After relocating to Portland, Oregon, in 1999, Calhoun formed a close friendship with the folk duo Dave Carter and Tracy Grammer. Before Carter's death in 2002 the pair contributed to Calhoun's 2003 album Tiger Tattoo, which was followed by an extended tour. An interest in rendering traditional Scottish ballads from older Scots dialect produced 2004's Telfer's Cows: Folk Ballads of Scotland, succeeded the same year by the original material on Shadow of a Wing. In 2005 he published the poetry volume Hay and released Staring at the Sun, featuring new recordings of pre-debut compositions. Calhoun's musical curiosity has remained broad, often leading him to investigate obscure repertoire with scholarly care. That approach shaped his 2008 release Bound to Go: African-American Spirituals and Secular Songs, which contained detailed liner notes and thirty-five tracks; the album also marked the first recorded duet with his daughter Casey Calhoun, who later appeared with him on a full-length project.
Grapevine, issued in 2011, presented Calhoun's interpretations of several jazz pieces, while Living Room in 2013 returned him to wholly original songs. He published the humor collection The Trilogy Trilogy in 2012. In subsequent years his focus returned to Scotland, culminating in the double album Rhymer's Tower: Ballads of the Anglo-Scottish Border, released in 2017. Thematically linked was Warlock Rhymer, his English translation of Robert Burns poems. The following year brought the duo album Skeins, recorded with his daughter Casey.
