Music

Carter Sampson

Voodoo Rooms, Edinburgh

Rob Adams

four stars

FOR A songwriter with an entertaining streak like Carter Sampson, the story of Katherine McHale Slaughterback is a gift.

A touring musician who named her campervan Mother Maybelle, after the matriarch of country music’s leading family and her heroic penchant for practicality in all circumstances, Sampson can also fashion a song out of most experiences.

Her subject matter ranges from the havoc wreaked by tornados in her native Oklahoma to the unalloyed joy of attending the Rev Al Green’s Memphis church and the frustrations of falling for a flamenco guitarist more concerned with arpeggios than amorous reciprocity.

So, not surprisingly, a woman who fought off rattlesnakes for three hours and turned her vanquished foes into a dress, a pair of shoes and a line in rattler jewelry, makes a distinctly compelling heroine in Sampson’s Rattlesnake Kate. It’s a breathless tale, superbly well told and sung by a performer who clearly associates with Slaughterback’s character.

Accompanied by Dutch singer and guitarist BJ Baartmans, Sampson created a series of real life, country-rockin’ vignettes that transported the Voodoo Rooms’ Speakeasy to the heart of America. She sings with conviction and writes with honesty, detailing her own lonesome heart and gypsy soul in darker moments but also lightening up with her offbeat desire to become the queen of Oklahoma.

She has a fine partner in Baartmans, who flatpicked with energy, fingerpicked nimbly and applied fiery or tender slide guitar as the mood required, enhancing the one non-original, Shel Silverstein’s Queen of the Silver Dollar’s picaresque honky-tonk atmosphere, and lending the Carter Family-esque Medicine River an airy quality in keeping with its celebration of rural open space.