13-Year-Old Folk Singer Sammy Brue Visits American Songwriter

I first caught wind of 13-year-old folk singer Sammy Brue after hearing he was playing The 5 Spot in East Nashville for the club’s $2 Tuesdays series. I regrettably missed Brue’s set that night, showing up a few minutes late, so I invited him to our office to play a few tunes the next day.

A resident of Ogden, Utah, Brue was kicking around Music City for a few days with local musicians Joshua Black Wilkins and Joe Fletcher, artists the kid wonder has covered before and jammed with live.

Watch above as Brue performs the original song “East Nashville” at our office on his Loar Guitar, which sports autographs from admiring songwriters like Hayes Carll, Jason Isbell and David Rawlings. The young folkie is also a huge fan of Justin Townes Earle and says he adopted Earle’s unique guitar style, an idiosyncratic form of playing that borrows heavily from the clawhammer banjo method.

And click here to watch a performance of “The Woody Guthrie Song,” the first tune Brue wrote at age 10.