Hunter Burgamy — NOLA Music

HunterBurgamy

Born: New Orleans, LA — Active

Hunter Burgamy is a New Orleans guitarist, banjoist, and vocalist — a NOCCA- and Berklee-trained multi-instrumentalist who has become one of the city's few remaining native banjo players, leading the traditional jazz band The Garden of Joy and keeping century-old songs alive on Frenchmen Street and beyond.

Never heard Hunter Burgamy before?

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"Sugar Blues"

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Bouncin' Around (2023, with The Garden of Joy)

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"Hunter Burgamy is one of the last native banjo players keeping New Orleans' oldest songs alive."

Why We Love Hunter Burgamy

There aren't many New Orleans-born banjo players left, and that fact alone makes Hunter Burgamy worth paying attention to — a 2022 short documentary was literally titled "Banjo Is Dying in New Orleans," about him and the dwindling number of musicians carrying the instrument's local tradition forward. But Burgamy isn't a museum piece. A NOCCA- and Berklee-trained multi-instrumentalist who cut his teeth interning at Preservation Hall, he leads The Garden of Joy through songs that predate jazz itself — some dating back to 1877 — with a voice critics have called genuinely period-appropriate, not costume-party imitation. He's carried that sound from the Boston Common to the Reykjavik Blues Festival to Cuba's JoJazz, and brought all of it home to Frenchmen Street.

Biography

Keeping the Banjo Alive

Hunter Burgamy is a New Orleans-born guitarist, banjoist, and vocalist, and a graduate of both the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts (NOCCA) and Berklee College of Music, where he studied music business on a full Berklee City Music scholarship. He interned at Preservation Hall, working across the venue's music, marketing, and educational programs, and has performed internationally at the Reykjavik Blues Festival, the Yokohama Jazz Promenade, and Cuba's JoJazz Festival, as well as at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival and French Quarter Fest.

Burgamy is among a dwindling number of native New Orleans banjo players, a fact chronicled in the 2022 short documentary Banjo Is Dying in New Orleans. Rather than treating the instrument as a novelty, he plays it as a living tradition, deeply rooted in the city's blues, funk, and jazz history and open to the world folk musics that inform his playing. He is a regular performer at Buffa's Bar & Restaurant and the New Orleans Jazz Museum, and has played alongside Charmaine Neville, Carl Sonny Leyland, Paul Sanchez, and members of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, in addition to work with The Secret Six, Jenavieve and the Winding Boys, and Lonesome Heroes.

Burgamy's primary vehicle is The Garden of Joy, the traditional jazz band he leads on guitar, tenor banjo, and vocals. The band's 2023 debut album, Bouncin' Around, earned strong reviews from OffBeat Magazine and The Syncopated Times, the latter praising Burgamy's "remarkable period vocal" and comparing the record's low-down, blues-inflected sound to the influence of Tuba Skinny.