About Samantha Crain
Samantha Crain is a Choctaw Nation songwriter, musician, producer, and singer, signed with Ramseur Records and Real Kind Records and Full Time Hobby Records .
Crain won three NAMMYs in 2009 for Folk Album of the Year and Songwriter of the Year and in 2022 for Single of the Year for "Bloomsday". She also won the Indigenous Music Award for Best Rock Album in 2019. Her songs were featured on many series and films including 90210, Hung, Barking Water, The Dark Divide, Resident Alien, Reservation Dogs, Echo, and Unreserved: The Work of Louie Gong. In 2017 and 2018, she worked with the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem to compose and contribute music for the extensive T.C. Cannon exhibit At the Edge of America. In July 2018, she self-released a collection of sonnets En Masse: A Collection of 30 Sonnets by Samantha Crain. In 2022, she composed the musical score for the film Fancy Dance starring Lily Gladstone and directed by Erica Tremblay.
Crain was born and raised in Shawnee, Oklahoma and is of Choctaw heritage. She attended Grove School in Shawnee and Dale High School in Dale, Oklahoma. As a child and teenager, Crain competed in powerlifting. Crain taught herself to play guitar and wrote songs based on her short stories the summer before her senior year at Dale High School. Crain began touring when she was 19. Her first tours were either solo or as a duo with Beth Bombara. She then founded Samantha Crain and the Midnight Shivers with Jacob Edwards and Andrew Tanz and toured with this band until 2009.
Crain has lent her voice to recordings for Murder By Death, Parker Millsap, Wild Pink, Hamish Hawk, and others. She also appeared on Conan with First Aid Kit for their filmed performance of "Stay Gold".
She has toured with the Avett Brothers, Cotton Jones, Langhorne Slim, Neutral Milk Hotel, The Mountain Goats, Murder By Death, Brandi Carlile, Watchhouse, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Amigo the Devil, John Moreland, The Staves, William Elliott Whitmore, Lucy Rose, Josh Ritter, Adrian Edmondson and the Bad Shepherds, First Aid Kit, Ha Ha Tonka, Deer Tick, Smoke Fairies, Thao and the Get Down Stay Down, Sister Suvi, Ingrid Michaelson, Meiko, Racheal Yamagata, Jenny Owen Youngs, Jessica Lea Mayfield, Emma Gatrill, American Aquarium, Erland and the Carnival, Parker Millsap, Broncho, Ali Harter, Beth Bombara, Berry, Ben Weaver, the Everybodyfields, Bombadil, Gregory Alan Isakov, Ninja Gun, and others.
Crain has self-produced many of her own recordings, but in 2014, produced the debut record of Oklahoma-based country singer-songwriter, Kierston White. The album was recorded at Blackwatch Studios in Norman, Oklahoma. It is entitled Don't Write Love Songs. Also, in 2015, she produced the album Thought of You A God by the Oklahoma-based band, Annie Oakley. In 2022, she produced the album, Reservoir, by Kinsey Charles.
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