Portland musician Samuel James wore an easy smile on his face as he looked out over his audience of students at Maine Coast Waldorf School in Freeport.

“Is anybody in here an artist?” James asked, and hands shot up.

James, 45, specializes in the Black American folk tradition and tours around the world. He is a songwriter, a guitarist, a banjo player, a harmonicist, a pianist. He is a storyteller who has been featured on “This American Life” and “The Moth.” He is the writer of the long-running column “Racisms,” published in The Bollard magazine, and a newsletter about racial history. He is the podcaster behind “99 Years,” which explored Black history in Maine and how this state became the whitest in the nation.

But he sees one hat, not many.

“To me, it’s all the same,” he said. “In the way that walking and running and sitting and crawling are all the same in that they are movement.”

This spring, Portland Ovations is presenting a school program called “Stories and Songs with Samuel James,” which he created as part music theory, part history lesson, part just plain fun. It encapsulates the multidisciplinary approach that has made him a respected voice – no matter if he is singing, speaking or writing.

“Samuel does so many things, and he does all of them at an expert level,” said Liz Schildkret, director of school and family programs at Portland Ovations.

A ‘LINEAGE OF MUSIC’

James is originally from Biddeford. When he was a kid, his dad ordered the first volume of the World Book Encyclopedia off a television ad. His father read the whole thing and then bought the next one.

“He read through the entire World Book Encyclopedia three times,” James said with a laugh. “He would tell you, ‘Because I didn’t get it the first two.’ This is the environment I grew up in.”

That curiosity shaped him. So did the music that surrounded him as his relatives played piano or fiddle or trombone. Those twin pillars built his career.

“I’ve always told stories with music,” he said. “It’s always been very important to me that this music has a history, has a context, and that context is painful. The point of the music is to find joy in this pain.”

James often performs solo, which means he is in constant conversation with the audience. He might play “Bandy Rooster Blues” by Charley Patton, an early and influential Mississippi blues performer who was making music in the early 20th century.

“Charley Patton lived on Dockery Farms plantation in Mississippi, and ‘Bandy Rooster’ is primarily a song about a chicken,” James said. “So I’m going to go to some audience wherever and tell you, how are you going to relate to some Black man singing about a chicken 100 years ago? It’s going to require a little context.”

So he would talk about Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf. He would talk about the Chicago blues and electric blues musicians who mostly came from Mississippi. He would tell the audience that all those guys studied with and learned from Charley Patton. He would say, “You can trace this lineage of music straight through the Rolling Stones, straight through all of rock ‘n’ roll, all to this one guy in Dockery Farms in Mississippi, and here’s the kind of song he might play – a song about a chicken.”

During his school performance in Freeport, James sat next to a banjo and three guitars. He started with the banjo first and told the story about how people who had been kidnapped from Africa into slavery created the banjo to mirror an instrument from their homes. The kids stomped their feet to the rhythm of “The Midnight Special.” He continued to play each guitar in turn, showing the difference between strumming and finger picking, telling stories and drawing giggles from his young audience.

While Black American folk music has those deep roots, James said it also has unexplored territory. The record labels that were popularizing the genre in the early 1900s went under during the Great Depression, and that lapse stunted its growth for decades.

“To my mind, there’s a whole lot of stuff you can do with that music that just didn’t get done because of the Depression,” he said in an interview. “So that’s where I think my place is.”

Before 2020, James spent much of his time traveling. He has performed in 22 countries and every state except Hawaii. The pandemic changed his plans. But he found a refuge in Portland Ovations, which hired him and other Maine artists to create new performance pieces during those months of isolation and shutdowns. He also developed a virtual school program for Portland Ovations, at the time called “Samuel James Tells The Story of Tiny Bill McGraw.” That partnership has only continued to grow.

“That relationship saved my life in COVID,” he said. “It really allowed me to sit and create, and everything they had intended, it totally worked.”

SEARCHING FOR UNDERSTANDING

When Trayvon Martin was killed in Florida in 2012, James posted on Facebook. That post turned into a regular column about racism in the Portland Phoenix; it is now published in the free monthly magazine The Bollard. In recent months, he has weighed in on Portland’s push to get rid of homeless encampments, the city’s Civilian Police Review Board and its city manager form of government.

“I think the reason the column feels important to me is that Maine is the whitest state for a reason, right?” he said. “For a few reasons. And one of those reasons is that we don’t like to look at it.”

Since 2020, James has found himself choosing to tour less and stay home more. In 2022, his curiosity inspired another project: the “99 Years” podcast. He released five episodes in the first season, each one less than 30 minutes, weaving together local and national history. He told the shameful story of how Maine forcibly removed the residents of a mixed-race fishing community on Malaga Island in 1912. He referenced Mathieu Da Costa, the first Black person ever recorded to set foot in what is now Maine in the 1600s. He delved into the relationship between the Ku Klux Klan and the city manager form of government that is still in place in Portland today.

“The slogan for the state of Maine is ‘The way life should be,'” he said in the introduction. “Known for lobsters and lighthouses, the state is also known for something else. Maine is the whitest state, and that’s not an accident. The reason involves presidents, robber barons, a forgotten time of Black American progress and a nationwide conspiracy to help the South rise again. But this isn’t just a chronicle of racial struggle or a tale of lost histories. It’s a story about Black experience and what happens when people try to account for the past.”

In 2023, he also started a newsletter on Substack under the title “Banned Histories of Race in America.” Those stories are not just from Maine; he has written about Benjamin Banneker, the Black man who built the first clock in America in 1752; the Colored Hockey League that predated the National Hockey League by 22 years; and Beyoncé’s foray into country music on her latest album.

That same desire for context is again driving his work.

“At least for me, an understanding of a thing alleviates me from a frustration,” he said. “It may present other frustrations, but when you don’t know how a thing works and, all of a sudden, you figure out how it works, even if you can’t necessarily do something about that in the moment or you realize the problem was too big for you, there’s a satisfaction.”

Eighth grade teacher Heidi Davidson said the Maine Coast Waldorf School has hosted other artists through Portland Ovations, and she was excited to help bring James to the school this year. She recognized his name first from his writing.

“I read Samuel James’ column in The Bollard, and I was interested in what he would bring to the students,” she said.

FINDING A COMMUNITY

James moved to Portland in his early 20s to find other artists. Even as he has toured across the country and expanded his career, he has continued to make his home base here. When he started touring years ago, he noticed a difference in the local audience that made him want to stay.

“If you went to my show, which is just me and a guitar telling stories and songs, but then you’d go to the death metal show and then you’d go to hip-hop night and then you’d go to like a folk dance thing, you would see the same people,” he said. “The artistic audience appreciated quality over genre. I go on tour, and people will be like, ‘Oh, what’s the blues scene like in Maine?’ And I’m like, ‘I don’t know. It might just be me.'”

“It just hit me that there was a particular view of art and people who are making it here that just wasn’t like a lot of other places. Other places really do carve off community according to things like genre, and that’s not just how it was here. And it just felt better to be in a place that doesn’t confine you in that way. There’s a real feeling of lightness to it, and you feel that in the audience, you feel that in the other musicians in town, you feel that in your community.”

Still, the artists he found in Portland then were mostly white. He wished at times for the opportunity to connect with Black artists, especially those who were older and more experienced. Today, he said he has found that community that was missing at Indigo Arts Alliance. James performed with artist Toshi Reagon at the grand opening for Indigo Arts Alliance in 2019. He has since been a mentor artist-in-residence at the nonprofit and is still a frequent collaborator. When he needed a fiscal sponsor for his podcast “99 Years,” Indigo Arts Alliance took on that responsibility.

“I don’t have the words to expressed how thrilled I am that they’re here,” he said. “Because I wish that existed when I was a child. I wish that existed so much. To know that, like, from their beginning until now until whenever into the future, Black people who are artists in this community do not have to exist without knowing that feeling of community.”

Jordia Benjamin, the executive director of Indigo Arts Alliance, said the project was perfectly in sync with the organization’s mission.

“We are also doing the work of redefining what the Maine landscape looks like,” she said. “From an outsider looking in, you would think that there is no Black history in the state because it is not a widely known fact; it is not a history that is talked about daily.”

“That’s exactly what Sam was doing in ’99 Years,’ providing and shining a light on a section of history that no one knew, no one talked about,” she added.

James is now working on a second season of “99 Years,” as well as a new podcast project. Portland Ovations has already presented “Stories and Songs with Samuel James” at two local schools and will continue to book the show through the end of the school year. This summer, his schedule includes teaching at a guitar camp, giving a talk at a library, and traveling to Colorado to perform. He’ll keep writing, researching and telling stories.

“Sam is always sharing,” Benjamin said. “That is one of his greatest attributes as an artist. He has a wonderful way of welcoming a community, either through song or storytelling or through other means as a way of captivating an audience.”

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