Colin Cutler Brings Southern Roots Music to St. David A.M.E. Zion Church in Sag Harbor for a Festival Kickoff Tied to Underground Railroad History
SAG HARBOR, NY — Colin Cutler will open the 16th annual Sag Harbor American Music Festival on Thursday, Sept. 24, with a performance at St. David A.M.E. Zion Church in Eastville. The show pairs his blend of folk, blues and jazz with a setting steeped in African American history and local memory.
The event marks a homecoming of sorts for the church itself. After years of housing a Baptist congregation, St. David’s is returning to its roots as an A.M.E. Zion house of worship, and the festival kickoff will include a ribbon-cutting ceremony alongside a public push to build a community choir.
A church with Underground Railroad ties and a new chapter in Eastville
St. David’s sits within a history that organizers connect to the Underground Railroad. While there is no official written record, oral tradition says the church served as a maritime stop where whaling ships and other vessels helped smuggle formerly enslaved people north, often toward Canada.
That history gives Cutler’s appearance extra weight for the Eastville Community Historical Society, which is helping frame the evening as both a musical performance and a statement about preservation. Dr. Georgette Grier-Key, the society’s executive director and curator, said the festival is making a major effort to recruit singers of all ages, generations and backgrounds for the church’s community choir.
The performance also links the Sag Harbor site to a broader Underground Railroad story that began hundreds of miles away in Greensboro, North Carolina, where Guilford College’s Witness Tree and the Guilford Woods are documented parts of the route’s early history.
Why festival organizers wanted Cutler first on the bill
Festival leaders said Cutler was an immediate fit for the opening night slot. Kelly Connaughton Dodds, the festival’s president and co-artistic director, said the event is designed to showcase American music and give audiences a sense of the country’s musical traditions and how they have traveled around the world.
Cutler’s sound, she said, bridges styles in a way that matches that mission. His mix of roots music, storytelling and acoustic performance was exactly what organizers wanted for a church setting tied to history and community memory.
The lineup for the four-day festival is largely free, with the exception of Friday night’s ticketed headliner. For opening night, the focus is on the church, the music and the symbolic return of St. David’s to a place of worship and gathering.
How a military career and a late start shaped Cutler’s music
Cutler’s path to roots music was anything but straight. Born in England and raised mostly across the United States as an Air Force child, he grew up in homes influenced by Christian radio, church music and a strict Pentecostal environment.
He picked up guitar at 16 and later tried to move toward heavier music in college, including a power metal band idea that never took off. Instead, he found himself drawn toward acoustic playing, old-time country and folk after meeting musicians in worship and local bluegrass circles in Virginia.
That turn gave him room to write the kinds of stories he wanted to tell. He says the older American styles let him move from poetry into song, and they became the foundation for a career that would later include both solo work and band performances.
From the Army National Guard to a full-time writing life
Before music became his main focus, Cutler served seven years as an officer in the Virginia Army National Guard. His military career took him to Germany, Qatar and a Romanian NATO mission, where he worked as a public affairs officer.
He said he valued the chance to interact with people outside the chain of command, but by 2018 he had decided it was time to leave the military. He described that choice as a moment when he and the Army had both reached the end of the road.
Afterward, he returned to Greensboro and eventually resumed life as a musician and teacher. He now teaches composition and developmental English at Guilford Technical Community College while continuing to write and perform.
Albums, poetry and the Southern Gothic influence behind Tarwater
Cutler has been recording steadily since 2016, beginning with “Nelson County Wayside,” which came out just before a deployment. Since then, he has released four full-length albums through both his electric band, Hot Pepper Jam, and solo projects.
One of those records, “Tarwater,” released in 2023, reflects his interest in writer Flannery O’Connor and the uneasy mix of sin, grace and moral struggle that runs through her fiction. He said O’Connor helped him step away from the religious worldview of his upbringing and become more fully his own person.
Festivalgoers will hear songs from that album at St. David’s, including “Bad Man’s Easy.” The piece draws from O’Connor’s work and carries the kind of language and tension that Cutler says is central to his songwriting.
Why the Sag Harbor performance feels like a full-circle moment
For Cutler, the church performance connects the different chapters of his life: faith, travel, military service, literature and roots music. The evening places a musician with Southern ties and a complicated spiritual history in a building linked by oral tradition to a path toward freedom.
That symbolism matters to organizers, who see the concert as part of a larger effort to strengthen the church’s presence in the community while honoring its past. The ribbon cutting and choir invitation are meant to turn history into something living rather than merely remembered.
Cutler’s set is expected to feature guitar, banjo and harmonica, backed by Evan Campfield on stand-up bass. In a space where silence and testimony have long carried meaning, the festival hopes the songs will do the talking.
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