All songs written by Les Sampou and published by MoNando Music, ASCAP.
Fall from Grace, Flying Fish CD FF 657, © 1996 Rounder Records Corp.,
One Camp Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02140 USA

Les Sampou is tough. She's also tender, and smart. And funny. And she plays some very tasty guitar. And damn, can she write a song.

The first thing I noticed about her, though, was the way she sang an old Blind Blake number called "Police Dog Blues." I'd heard probably a dozen other people do the tune, and they all did it like a museum piece, an interesting guitar arrangement that a great ragtime-blues guitarist had recorded in 1929. When Les did it, there was nothing historical about it. She was maybe the first person since Blake to sound like she was telling a story, a wry little anecdote about being in love with some guy who was so obviously uninterested that she was afraid he would sic his dog on her.

The performance was charming and funny, but the really impressive thing was the disarming directness of Les's delivery. There was something genuine about it which is all too rare in today's music world and which typifies what I like about her work. It does not matter whether she wrote a song herself or whether it was written thirty years before she was born; when she sings it, it sounds like it happened to her. That is what makes her shows so compelling. On stage, she is completely natural, and it feelsas if she would be much the same if she were sitting around in a room full of friends, swapping stories and playing a few tunes.

That may be because Les's love affair with music started long before she considered going on stage. Growing up in the Boston suburbs, she can remember hearing her parents' folk records drifting up to her bedroom. Once she could go out on her own, she became a hardcore rock concert junkie, going to at least a concert a week. She always enjoyed singing and making up songs, and fooled around on an old guitar of her father's for a year or so before sticking it back in the closet. She even mastered the exotic art of defensive harmonica playing ("I used to play on the way home from waitressing late at night," she remembers. "I figured it would ward off any guys who were following me, because they'd think I was out of my mind").

The idea of taking up music as a career, though, did not hit Les until one night in her early 20s, when she saw Ellen McIlwaine at Passim Coffeehouse in Cambridge. "Outside of Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee one time in Colorado, I don't think I had ever seen an acoustic act in a club," she remembers. "I was blown away, watching this real powerful woman up on stage, singing and playing guitar and doing her own songs by herself,with no band, no nothing. I walked out of Passim and I burst into tears. It was the strangest thing. I don't even know why I was crying - it was just a very deep feeling and I was very upset.

"I remember going home that night and thinking about it and waking up thinking about it, and that went on for the longest time, until I just finally said, `I'm not gonna turn 40 years old and say that I should have done this and that I could have done it.' So I went out and got a guitar."

Les had seen Paul Rishell, the dean of Boston-area acoustic bluesmen, and she decided that he was the man to study with. "I went up and approached him," she says. "And he was great. I used to go into his kitchen and play with him once a week for about a year. I didn't even know the chords he taught me. To this day, I don't know the names of the notes I'm playing half the time, I just make it up by ear.

"After that year with Paul, I kept on taking things off of records. I put my own gauge on whether I was improving or not, and I would come home from work and before I'd eat I would sit down and play an hour every day. Then, as I got better, I'd up it to two hours and then three, and finally I quit my full-time job and went part-time and started playing in the clubs. I had a part-time job for 10 years, and last year I quit that too."

A lot of younger musicians have been attracted to the classic country blues sound, but all too often they get trapped trying to sound like the old players and end up losing their own identity. Only a few (Greg Brown, Lucinda Williams, and Keb' Mo' come to mind) manage to absorb the older styles, then use them in new, personal ways. Les is one of those. She knows and understands the blues, but it is only the foundation of a style that reaches easily into rock, folk and country.

"I think it's great that people like my blues stuff," she says. "But at the same time I don't want them to box me in. Because I love all kinds of music and I write all kinds of music and I don't ever want to feel like I have to be one thing."

A lot of songwriters call themselves storytellers, but she really is one. Most of the stories come from her life, but they are not introspective or self-indulgent, and they have an emotional resonance that hits home. And she turns a phrase with a grace and humor that is very rare. No matter how bad things get, she can turn a wry eye on herself. Like the old blues masters, she is singing her way out of her bad moods and celebrating the good ones, and her songs are the kind that make you want to spend a lot more time with the writer.

Elijah Wald
Somerville, Massachusetts, July 1996