It’s back to work for fiddler and banjoist Miriam Hacksaw, and that means the Eugene native who now lives in New Orleans is hitting the road for five months. “New Orleans feels like a vacation to me,” she says from Olympia, Washington, before a performance. “Touring is the work.” That work brings her to Sam Bond’s June 21 and a chance to catch up with family and friends. The 2015 Churchill High School grad started at a young age with fiddle, learning from Melissa Takush and the Mud City Old Time Society. She’s also played with Foraging and the Rattling Bones. After college in Seattle, Hacksaw settled in Walton for a brief spell in 2020 and learned the banjo, inspired by banjoist extraordinaire Rhiannon Giddens, whom she is opening for this summer at a show in Santa Rosa, California. She notes that the fiddle is her primary instrument, and her work has been described as raw with influences from traditional folk and punk music. “I play a little more aggressively,” she says. Still, she believes in the old-school folk music, and in the last year, Hacksaw has also collected and reinterpreted songs from Kerala, India, her father’s homeland, creating a repertoire of Malayali-American fiddle tunes, some of which she will play at Sam Bond’s.

Miriam Hacksaw performs 9 pm Saturday, June 21, at Sam Bond’s, 407 Blair Boulevard. Others playing on Sam Bond’s stage that night are Americana-country singer Marcus Brown and the jug band Dumpster Joe. Tickets are $15.