Sam Bartlett

Sam Bartlett (born Samuel Hamilton Bartlett, November 8, 1961, Burlington, Vermont) is an American folk artist, public art instigator, cartoonist, performer, musician, and composer. As an artist, Bartlett’s iconic style has been featured in publications, solo and collaborative public artworks, and moving object performances including panoramic “crankie shows” and large-scale papier-mache puppetry. Stuntology is Bartlett’s signature art and performance genre of humorous parlor tricks and messy exploration of fun with everyday objects. Decades of collection and documentation are represented in four illustrated volumes of Stuntology cartoons, as well as his long-running one-man show.
As a musician, Bartlett has had longtime prominence as a performer and composer in the national contra dance music circuit.
Early life.
Bartlett is the youngest of four children born to Richmond Jay Bartlett and Martha Harry Bartlett. He attended Shelburne Village School and the Shelburne Middle School in Shelburne, Vermont. He received the Daughters of the American Revolution Good Citizenship Award in 8th grade. At Champlain Valley Union High School in Hinesburg, Vermont, he was voted class clown and was known for his banjo playing, drawing and tennis skills. After graduating in three and a half years, Bartlett attended the University of Vermont and studied geography (1984).
Musical career.
Bartlett performed with The Green Mountain Volunteers on the banjo and as an Appalachian clogger in 1984. He played contra dances around Vermont and New England starting in 1985, supplementing his income by making apple cider for the Chittenden Cider Mill from 1985 to 1988. After moving to Boston he became ensconced in the urban contra dance scene. During this time he played mandolin and tenor banjo with three highly influential touring bands: Uncle Gizmo, Wild Asparagus, and the Clayfoot Strutters, and assisted in reshaping the face of modern contra dance music.
Bartlett met his future wife, Abby Ladin, in 1992 and moved to Bloomington, Indiana, to be with her. Ladin's percussive dance group, Rhythm In Shoes (RIS), absorbed Bartlett and he toured with RIS for the next 10 years.
Bartlett resumed playing the national contra dance circuit in 1997 after forming the Reckless Ramblers (with Larry Unger, Nat Hewitt, Ginny Snowe, and later Mark Hellenberg) and also being an original member of the Sevens (with Mark Roberts, Sarah Blair, Stuart Kenney, and Mark Hellenberg). In 2005, Bartlett began playing with Notorious (Eden MacAdam-Somer, Larry Unger, and Mark Hellenberg) and continues to play with them to this day. Since 2014, Bartlett has also been a member of the 5-piece Stringrays, with Rodney Miller, Max Newman, Mark Hellenberg, and Stuart Kenney.
In addition to being a contra dance musician, Bartlett has maintained a dual identity as an old-time musician. He helped found the Monks shortly thereafter (with Frank Hall, Claudio Buchwald, and Abby Ladin.) The Monks released two critically acclaimed recordings, distributed widely by County Records: "Let Us Play" (1998), and "Ragged But Righteous" (2002). In 1999, Bartlett began playing with Illinois native fiddler Garry Harrison, and he was an integral member of the group that made the now legendary recording of original old-time music, "Red Prairie Dawn" (2000).
Though a proud practitioner and teacher of various traditional music styles, Bartlett has made his own recording career as a musical iconoclast, choosing to blend musical styles rather than adhere to any notion of genre purity. This started with "Sam and Sue Belting You with Reels" (1993, re-released in 2006) with Bartlett playing swing guitar with traditional Irish fiddler, Sue Sternberg. Bartlett traveled to southwest Louisiana in 1996 and teamed up with Dirk Powell to make "Swamp Ceili", the first radical mixing of Irish and Cajun and Zydeco music. "Swamp Ceili" featured the slide guitarist Sonny Landreth. In 2004, Bartlett followed "Swamp Ceili" with a recording of all original music, "Evil Diane". This was the first contra dance repertoire CD to be reviewed on NPR’s "All Things Considered". In 2016, Bartlett released a sequel to "Evil Diane", "Dance-a-rama".
Cartoonist and community artist.
Concurrent with a long and active music performing career, Bartlett has maintained another identity as a documentarian and drawer of tricks and stunts. "The Journal of Stuntology" was Bartlett's self-published zine from 1992 to 2006. A selection of cartoons from the zine was edited into the book "Stuntology" (2002) and followed in 2007 by "The Big Book of Stuntology". Workman publishing bought the rights to these two books in 2007 and put out "The Best of Stuntology" (2008). Bartlett has also self-published "51 Impossible Stunts Anyone Can Do".
Bartlett has been a featured character/performer on the Indiana PBS show, "The Friday Zone", since 2012. The steady rotation of 45 different segments of his stunts has made him recognizable to children throughout the state.
As an offshoot of illustrating a series of books, Bartlett has been hired by the city of Bloomington, Indiana, to do public artwork, notably featuring traffic boxes and two murals. The mural for the Building and Trades Park measures 240 feet long and celebrates the trades that built the city of Bloomington. Bartlett has designed a street mural for Bloomington Open Streets, and received Indiana State Arts in the Parks Grants a collaborative moving panorama.
Bartlett has been hired by communities across the country to do local, participatory art projects. His specialty has been to make participatory “Cranky Shows,” hand-cranked, moving panorama drawings that tell stories that happened in a certain locale. He has been a touring artist in Alaska and an artist in residence with the Juneau Arts and Humanities Council. He received a grant from the State of Indiana to write a moving panorama history of its oldest State Park, McCormick's Creek State Park. He was hired by the Lotus World Music Festival to make giant paper mache parade masks and a participatory cranky show about the life of Lotus Dickey.
Personal life.
He lives with his wife, Abby Ladin, and three kids in Bloomington, Indiana.