Sam Wharton

Musician
Best known for Guitar

Sam Wharton is a guitarist and harmony singer based in Asheville, North Carolina, and a founding member of the Songs From The Road Band. He and the bassist Charles Humphrey III started the band with the mandolinist Mark Schimick as a side project for songs their main bands were not using, and it later became a full-time touring group.

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The band set out to put players known from progressive bluegrass to work on original songs in a more mainstream style. Wharton played guitar and sang on Traveling Show (Lucks Dumpy Toad, 2015), and he was the guitarist on all eleven tracks of Road to Nowhere (2018). When Humphrey left the Steep Canyon Rangers to make the band a full-time group, its core was Schimick on mandolin, Wharton on guitar and James Schlender on fiddle, with a number of banjo players over the years.

In May 2020, with touring stopped and the band laid off, Wharton teamed up with the Asheville event venue Ambrose West to present Bands2Fans, a free weekly series of live-streamed concerts by western North Carolina musicians. The band kept releasing singles through the early 2020s, and Wharton played guitar on all eleven tracks of Pay Your Dues (2023), with Gabe Epstein on banjo. He sings harmony on “Halfway Home” (2025), and in July 2026 the band released Just Hanging On, its seventh studio album, with Wharton still on guitar.

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