JAMIE SAVAGE
Musician, Piercefield, N.Y.

Jamie Savage began writing songs soon after he started playing guitar at the age of 16. While a student at Paul Smith’s College in the early 1980’s, Jamie played rhythm guitar and sang lead vocals for a college rock n roll band called “Easy Street.” In the mid-1980s, Jamie teamed up with folksinger Peggy Lynn to perform traditional and original folk songs around the Central New York area.

After finishing graduate school at ESF in Syracuse, NY and securing a full-time position as a professor at ESF’s Ranger School in Wanakena, N.Y., Jamie began again to find some time to fit music back into his life. He joined the folk/acoustic rock group “Trillium” and performed with them for about a year in the northern New York/Adirondack area. A few years later, he befriended Rick Kovacs and Angie Oliver, who had recently moved from Vermont to the northwest Adirondacks, and began to learn a whole lot about the world of traditional music. Jamie still performs with Rick and Angie and their talented friends on occasion, playing guitar and clawhammer banjo and providing both lead and backup vocals.

With these and other fantastic experiences behind him, Jamie has become especially prolific in the first few years of the 21st century. His new songs focus on the natural and cultural history of the Adirondacks — where he has spent summers since he was 9 and lived year-round for the last 16 years — and on his concern for the environment in an era of exponential human population growth. But they also reflect his profound fascination with the goodness of people, with the nature of people, and with the relationships between people and nature. His experience as a forester for nearly 20 years, and as a teacher of forestry for 16, provides him with a seemingly endless supply of refreshing nature metaphors to enliven and consummate his songs.

With both new and old songs to share, and with the continued support of his family and some great friends, Jamie recently began work on his third CD and now performs regularly in the central and northern New York area.