Sam Cahoon was born north of San Francisco in the small town of Petaluma, California. He claims to have been a singer since before he could remember, but did not start playing music until he was 16. "I was attending an independent study high school when I started playing music, so I was able to practice upwards of five hours a day.” Although he was into punk rock as a teenager, traditional Irish folk came as the most natural thing for Sam to play. “I had already been singing the songs for years before I started playing them. I was originally attracted to Irish ballads because of the lyrics' fluent poetry. My biggest singing influences were
Luke Kelly, of The Dubliners, and
Liam Clancy, of The Clancy Brothers". Sam quickly became proficient at playing the old favorites, and then moved on to digging up and composing lesser known folk songs. "I have always loved finding a beautiful, forgotten folk song and putting new life into it. I greatly respect people like Woody Guthrie, John and Alan Lomax, and Ewan MacColl for collecting songs and keeping them alive." It was also at this time that he started writing his own songs, with topics ranging from love to war to whiskey drinking. "Song writing came naturally to me. I would take a story or event, and whittle it down to the core, keeping it short and sweet. In school I studied Stanislavski and the magic "if". That had a major influence on my writing. The majority of my songs are written in the first person." No doubt about it, Sam Cahoon seems to have created a style of his own, a fusion of Irish, folk, country, and rock, with his own unique twist.
