Michael Beauchamp
Michael Beauchamp-Cohen is a Michigan songwriter and multi-instrumentalist best known as half of the roots duo Red Tail Ring, which he formed with the fiddler and banjo player Laurel Premo in 2009. He plays guitar, banjo, mandolin and fiddle, writes most of the duo’s original songs with Premo, and has recorded under his own name since 2008. He performed as Michael Beauchamp until 2015, when he legally added “Cohen” in honor of his stepfather.
He began playing guitar at thirteen, when his stepfather wrote out five basic chord shapes for him, and he grew up hearing his stepfather’s bluegrass alongside rock, blues and Bob Dylan. At the University of Michigan he formed the Dumb and Ugly Club with the guitarist Gina Pensiero, who made two EPs, and from 2004 to 2006 he played in an Ann Arbor trio, the Ambitious Brothers, with Chris Bathgate and Karl Sturk. His solo debut, My Northern Voices (2008), was recorded in late December 2007 in a small cabin in East Jordan, Michigan.
He and Premo met in Ann Arbor in 2009 and set out to play traditional music in new ways and to write songs of their own. Red Tail Ring’s first two albums came out together on 1 April 2011: Middlewest Chant, of songs the two had written, and Mountain Shout, of traditional pieces such as “Red Rocking Chair” and “Bowling Green.” On them he played guitar, banjo, mandolin, octave mandolin, harmonica and flat-picked fiddle. The Heart’s Swift Foot (May 2013), recorded at La Luna Studio in Kalamazoo, was again their own songs apart from Hazel Dickens’s “My Heart’s Own Love” and the traditional “St. James Hospital,” and Fall Away Blues (September 2016), their fourth album, set eight originals beside traditional songs including “Wondrous Love” and “Come All Ye Fair and Tender Ladies.” The duo also made an EP, August Roads, and a vinyl collaboration with the band Lindsay Lou, The New Roots Exchange.
Since 2012 he and Premo have also played for dances across the Midwest in the Bowhunter String Band with Samantha Cooper and Sam Herman, which released The Right Hands ’Round in 2014. With Red Tail Ring and on his own he has played the Wheatland Music Festival in Michigan, the Port Fairy Folk Festival in Australia, Haapavesi Folk in Finland, the Bluegrass Jamboree in Germany and Red Wing Roots in Virginia, more than a thousand shows on three continents, and has shared stages with Joel Mabus and John McCutcheon. In 2020 he released a single, “The Windmill,” written with the Michigan songwriter Brian Koenigsknecht and recorded at La Luna.
