As he has said, Payne came rather late to music. "I was living in St. George, when my youngest brother came through. He's an innovative jazz guitarist, and he handed me a guitar. 'Everyone else in the family knows how to play,' he said. 'We're tired of you not playing.' I had done some singing with groups before that, but I decided I'd better learn the guitar."

And once he did that, "I reconciled myself to the fact that I'm a folk singer. That's a dirty word to pop musicians," he jokes. But he was so drawn to "the stories of this place. They are what make us what we are. I have an opportunity to tell those stories. To be able to tell them effectively is the gift, and it is a gift," he says.

And now, yes, "one job is to put food on the table. But I've also learned that if the audience walked away, I would still have to make the music. I would still have to write, learn and perform songs."

And while he is grateful that audiences have stayed with him, he also hopes that he has given something to them.

His mother used to say that "folk singers are the medicine men of the community. They can heal, they can inspire more than just entertain. There's something spiritually enriching in what a folk singer does."

He doesn't write to teach exactly, he says, but songwriting is the way he "works out my life. It's the way I come to know God, family, community and our responsibilities as human beings. All that gets worked out in my mind through songs."

Plus, he says, he can't "discount the sheer fun of it. It's such a great pleasure to play with such great musicians as I do."

And he is conscious of his heritage. "My dad was billed as the 'Mormon Troubadour.' He was born of the pool of musicians that gave us the likes of the Kingston Trio and Bob Dylan."

His dad was a groundbreaker in many ways. "Back in those days, there was no LDS music industry. It overstates it to say he created the industry, but he and his contemporaries certainly had a hand in it."

Payne is one of five siblings "who all do this, in spite of our parents' best intentions. We will never stop being influenced by where we came from."

That is true for everyone, he says, and is exactly the message he hopes everyone can find in "Father to Son."

• For a list of Sam Payne's upcoming performances and information on the CD, visit www.sampayne.com.

---

E-mail: carma@desnews.com