Nathan Salsburg

Louisville-based Nathan Salsburg displays refined skill and precision as an acoustic fingerstyle guitarist. His résumé includes extensive sideman work with Joan Shelley, James Elkington, Bonnie "Prince" Billy (aka Will Oldham), and Jake Xerxes Fussell, even while steadily issuing his own solo projects such as the 2013 album Hard for to Win and Can't Be Won and the 2018 instrumental guitar set Third. On Landwerk and Landwerk No. 2 he constructed new pieces by looping short excerpts of Yiddish and klezmer performances from 78 rpm discs and layering his own guitar lines over them. Psalms arrived in 2021 with ten songs whose lyrics derived almost entirely from the Old Testament Tehillim. In 2024 he and Elkington resumed their partnership for All Gist, the duo’s third instrumental guitar-duet collection, while Salsburg and Oldham also tracked extended renditions of two Lungfish songs that became Hear the Children Sing the Evidence.

Kentucky upbringing introduced Salsburg to the folk and blues 78s his parents favored, igniting an interest that later led him both to record his own music and to serve as curator for the archives of folklorist Alan Lomax. After college he moved to New York, where he joined the Alan Lomax Archive in the early 2000s; by 2008 he handled most digital curation duties, editorial tasks, and the assembly of Lomax anthologies for multiple labels. Back in Kentucky he retained his position with the Association for Cultural Equity while writing largely instrumental guitar pieces, some of which appeared on Tompkins Square’s 2008 Imaginational Anthem, Vol. 3. In 2011 he signed with No Quarter and finished his debut solo album Affirmed; that same year he and British guitarist James Elkington issued the duet record Avos. His second solo album, Hard for to Win and Can't Be Won, followed in September 2013 and mixed vocal and instrumental tracks still rooted in American and British folk traditions. The following year Salsburg began accompanying labelmate Joan Shelley, a collaboration that deepened over time and eventually led to their marriage. Ambsace, his second project with Elkington, came out in 2015 on Paradise of Bachelors. Subsequent years found him performing and recording with Shelley while also appearing on albums by Red River Dialect, the Weather Station, and Jake Xerxes Fussell. Third, released in 2018, marked his first entirely solo instrumental guitar album and remains a career highlight.

For the 2020 pair Landwerk and Landwerk No. 2, Salsburg mined his record shelves for source material, selecting 78 rpm discs of Yiddish folk and klezmer music whose short passages he looped before grafting his guitar parts onto them. Psalms, issued in 2021, featured ten songs whose words came almost wholly from the Old Testament Tehillim; the music was composed by Salsburg and tracked with Spencer Tweedy on drums plus backing vocals from Will Oldham and Joan Shelley. Early in 2024 he and Elkington returned with All Gist, their third set of instrumental guitar duets and second for Paradise of Bachelors; among its original and traditional selections stood an unexpected version of Neneh Cherry’s “Buffalo Stance.”

As a teenager Salsburg admired the Baltimore post-punk band Lungfish. One of his favorite tracks, the simple circular melody “The Evidence,” later became a lullaby he would play one-handed on guitar while rocking his young daughter to sleep. He found he could stretch the melody at will and conceived a lengthy recorded version featuring Bonnie “Prince” Billy on vocals and Tyler Trotter on keyboards and electronic percussion. The same trio also expanded another Lungfish piece, “Hear the Children Sing,” and the two roughly twenty-minute performances were paired on Hear the Children Sing the Evidence, released by No Quarter Records in June 2024.