BIOGRAPHY

Cam Waters has spent the last thirty years crisscrossing the country and honing his unique style on the stages of coffeehouses, clubs, concert halls, and festivals. Music writers across the country and in Europe consistently commend his understated, expressive singing and his simple yet inventive fingerstyle and slide guitar playing.

His literate, tradition-based songwriting mixes seamlessly with his arrangements of rural blues, jug band songs, and American folk music. He has appeared in concert with Doc Watson, Dave Van Ronk, David Bromberg, Maria Muldaur, Greg Brown, Spider John Koerner, Dave Ray, Roy Book Binder, Steve James, Bob Brozman, Robin and Linda Williams, and many more of acoustic music's most well-respected performers.

Waters also spent five years playing National metal-bodied guitars, singing, playing kazoo, and stomping on a thrift store hi-hat cymbal with a jug band-influenced trio (they termed their music "Garage Jazz") called The Sugar Kings, which also included harmonica wizard/vocalist Clint Hoover and Steve Sandberg on tuba and trombone. The group enjoyed critical raves and performed at several major Midwestern music festivals before disbanding in early 2002.

Waters has released or been featured on a number of recordings since his first in 1988; including radio and festival "Best Of" compilations and a Flying Fish recording with Dakota Dave Hull in 1991, the count is over a dozen. His latest, "Magical Mystery Train," is far and away his best to date and shifts the focus back to his songwriting, though it still includes a few quirky arrangements of old blues and folk music. This recording features several Twin Cities musical mainstays and was recorded in Minneapolis by tone freak and vintage microphone collector Matthew Zimmerman.

He was also involved in one recording project with The Sugar Kings entitled "Take Your Time, Mr. Brown," which was released in early 2000 and, like Waters' solo recordings, quickly became a Minnesota Public Radio favorite.

A native of Iowa's only bona fide tourist trap (Spirit Lake/Arnold's Park/Okoboji), Waters spent a couple of years in Ames, IA, six years in Iowa City, seven on the Mississippi River in Red Wing, MN, six in St. Paul, and seven in Rochester, MN before moving back to Minneapolis in the summer of 2009, where he shares a house with his wife Trudy and is the Reading Specialist at Minneapolis Academy.

In his spare time, which he has recently realized is a fictional concept at best, he reads too much, listens to music obsessively, spends too much money dining out, bicycles when Minnesota weather permits, makes fun of Republicans, and of course does as many shows as possible.