This Crossroad Conversation is presented by Travel Oregon.

Sam Broussard is a musician, songwriter, teacher, and editor from Lafayette, Louisiana, and a four-time GRAMMY Award nominee. He has toured and recorded with artists known and unknown, and including a world tour with Franco-Swiss artist Stephan Eicher, and with his current group, Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys, a French language Cajun band. His more recent projects are a 30-year anniversary album with Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys and a live record with master slide guitarist Sonny Landreth. His fourth GRAMMY nomination was in 2017 for Broken Promised Land, a Cajun French project with lyricist and folklorist Barry Jean Ancelet, which he produced and recorded. Sam writes literate, cinematic songs that don’t require collaboration with a listener in order to get the meaning. Think bouncy, cheery, and bloodthirsty. 

Internationally renowned award-winning Portland-based singer/guitarist/songwriter Mary Flower is a prodigious talent whose seasoned skills have established her as one of America’s foremost roots performers. Flower combines deep historical knowledge with a restless creativity that keeps her music evolving into new territory while echoing influences from Piedmont to the Mississippi Delta, with additional stops at ragtime, swing, folk, and hot jazz.

Midwest native Flower relocated from Denver to the vibrant Portland music scene in 2004. Since then, she’s continued to impress crowds and critics at folk festivals in America and abroad, including Merlefest, Waterfront Blues Fest, King Biscuit, A Prairie Home Companion and the Vancouver Folk Festival, while maintaining a parallel career as a renowned guitar teacher. Along the way, she’s twice been a finalist in the International Fingerstyle Guitar Championship, as well as being nominated three times for the Blues Foundation’s prestigious “Blues Music Award.”