Poor Ellen Smith performs pure acoustic Americana music in an earthy and elegant style. The band’s repertoire combines traditional and original material to a dense and compact listening experience. While their instrumental and vocal work is mature and mellow, it also opens spaces for fresh undertones and hot jamming. At a Poor Ellen Smith concert you hear the music happen. The finesse of the band’s performances, the unique arrangements, and the musical individualism of all four band members speak to all who love hand-crafted American roots music.

                       Armin Hadamer          guitar and vocals

                       Matt Kramer                guitar 

                       Howard Parks             harmonica and vocals

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Band Member Bios

     Hailing from Cologne, Germany, Armin Hadamer has been a life-long student of the guitar playing of Norman Blake, Doc Watson, Clarence White and Tony Rice. He and his wife, Susanne Koehler, performed as the New Minstrels of the Rhine throughout the United States playing concerts at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, the Old Mansion at Strathmore Arts Center, the Augusta Heritage Center in Elkins, WV, the New England Folk Festival, the Summersville Bluegrass Festival, and dozens of universities, cultural institutions and festivals across the US. Armin is also a historian of traditional American music with a number of scholarly publications and workshops to his credit.  Along with Steve Galbraith, Armin is a founding member of  Poor Ellen Smith.

     From Washington, D.C., Howard Parks is a harmonica player and singer whose influences on the harmonica range from country harmonica wizard Deford Bailey to multi-instrumentalist Howard Levy. He spent his formative playing years with the Cambridge Harmonica Orchestra, including shows at the Kennedy Center’s Very Special Arts Festival, the Adams-Morgan Day Festival, and the Cambridge River Festival. These days he is delighted to be exploring a broad range of folk music as applied to the harmonica through Poor Ellen Smith.

     Matt Kramer started on the clarinet in elementary school.  He picked up the trombone, played in his high school marching band, and oboe, for the high school orchestra.  In high school he also started playing guitar and mandolin, and in 1971 played the mandolin solo in Respighi’s “Festival Roma” with that year’s All State High School Orchestra. Matt continued playing guitar after graduating, mostly blues and folk (including Celtic material), and developed an interest in jazz while in graduate school in the 1980’s. In the late 1970’s Matt performed on the guitar in Holland and France during his travels in Europe. Since moving to the Washington, D.C. area in 1991, he has primarily been playing jazz guitar, at festivals, restaurants, coffee houses, and private parties. Matt joined Poor Ellen Smith in December of 2010.