Chris Sand

the Rappin' Cowboy​

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Chris Sand, AKA Sandman The Rappin’ Cowboy, has traversed the blue highways and gravel backroads of the USA for over two decades, performing his unique blend of folk, punk, hip hop, and cowboy music in basements, living rooms, barns, performance halls, and dive bars along the way. Dubbed by Punk Planet in 2003 as “our Troubadour for the 21st Century,” Sand continues his adventure this year with his first album of kid's music, MAGIC BEANS: 16 Songs for Sprouting Children & Other Human Beans. As with his previous records, he continues intertwining rap music, comedy, and rural poetics to tell stories, build connections, and get folks--young & old alike--thinking in fresh, interconnected ways. 

 

Chris grew up in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains in western Montana on a small farm, but left the state soon after high school to explore the bigger world and write a thousand songs. In 2010 he was the subject of the feature-length award-winning documentary, ROLL OUT, COWBOY, which crystallized his life at the time as songster, jester, social activist, long haul trucker, and lonesome lover into a lyrical scrapbook of life lived in the flow of creativity under the great shadow of American discontent. 

As No Depression’s Grant Alden wrote way back in 1997 “…[Sandman’s] songs arise from the same dusty world Woody Guthrie wrote about without being mired in the dust of Guthrie's tradition." A quarter century later--back in Montana again; working at an arthouse movie theater; married, divorced, and fathering a wonderful tween-age daughter--Chris Sand’s humor, hope, and grit abide.

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