Pokey LaFarge

americana

Pokey LaFarge, born Andrew Heissler on June 26, 1983, in Bloomington, Illinois, is an American singer, songwriter and guitarist long associated with St. Louis, Missouri. He was given his first guitar and tenor banjo by a grandfather who played in the St. Louis Banjo Club, and traded the guitar for a mandolin at sixteen after hearing Bill Monroe. He left central Illinois after finishing high school in 2001 and spent several years busking and traveling before building a career around pre-war American vernacular music, drawing on early jazz, ragtime, country blues, western swing, vaudeville and Appalachian folk. He self-released Marmalade in 2006 and issued Beat, Move and Shake on the St. Louis label Big Muddy Records in 2008. That same year he met Ryan Koenig and Joey Glynn while playing on the street in Asheville, North Carolina; with Adam Hoskins they became the South City Three, the band behind Riverboat Soul and Middle of Everywhere on Free Dirt Records, each of which won an Independent Music Award for Americana album. Jack White produced a single for the group and released it on Third Man Records, which also issued the self-titled Pokey LaFarge in 2013; the band played on White's album Blunderbuss and opened his tour. Two albums for Rounder Records followed, Something in the Water (2015) and Manic Revelations (2017), then three for New West Records: Rock Bottom Rhapsody (2020), In the Blossom of Their Shade (2021) and Rhumba Country (2024). In 2026 he released Travelin' with Pokey LaFarge: Voice and Guitar Vol. I on his own Boxer Boy Records. LaFarge has also acted, playing Hank Snow in CMT's Sun Records and appearing in the Netflix film The Devil All the Time, and he contributed a recording to the Boardwalk Empire soundtrack. His touring band pairs his guitar and lead vocals with harmony singer Addie Hamilton, whom he married in 2023, plus guitar and trumpet, keyboards, bass and drums. He was named Western Swing Male at the 2017 Ameripolitan Music Awards.

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