Artist · Player · Words
Cameron Knowler
Fingerstyle guitarist and writer working in an instrumental Americana lineage.
- Role
- Singer · Songwriter · Guitar
- Based
- Nashville · Los Angeles · raised in Yuma, AZ
- Instruments
- Guitar
Cameron Knowler is a fingerstyle guitarist raised in Yuma, Arizona — now Nashville-based after a stretch in Los Angeles. His writing, on guitar and on paper, circles a particular lineage: the rural and pre-WWII Americana vocabulary of Norman Blake, Riley Puckett, Maybelle Carter, and the cowboy rhythm tradition.
He records and tours as a duo with Eli Winter. His 2025 album came together with Jordan Tice producing — Jay Bellerose, Rayna Gellert, and Robert Bowlin in the room. From his publishing imprint Rural Guitar he ships method books, transcription courses, and a song folio that reads like an annotated map of where the music came from. The mission stays the same across all of it: keep the old vocabulary alive by teaching it forward.
Credits include
Worried Songs · American Dreams Records · writing in Acoustic Guitar and Fretboard Journal
Recorded music
6 records
2025 Worried Songs
CRK
ArtistComposerGuitar
Produced by Jordan Tice; features Rayna Gellert, Jay Bellerose
2025
East of the Gilas (Lagniappe Session)
ArtistGuitar
2021 Dear Life Records
A1
ArtistGuitar
2021 American Dreams Records
Anticipation
with Eli Winter
ArtistComposerEngineerGuitar
2021 American Dreams Records
Places of Consequence
ArtistComposerGuitarBanjoMandolin
2019 Castle Dome Records
Honey off a Rock
ArtistGuitar
Teaching & writing
13 titles
Cameron's imprint
Rural Guitar
Method books, transcription courses, and song folios on the rural guitar tradition — Norman Blake, Riley Puckett, Maybelle Carter, Dick Justice, and the cowboy/Western lineage.
2024 Course
The Guitar Playing of Dick Justice
9 tunes from pioneering country guitarist Dick Justice — eBook + video
2023 Song Folio Foundational
Cameron Knowler's My Songs, Volume I
56-page song folio companion to CRK — original scores, photographs, drawings, archival materials of Yuma, AZ
2021 Method Book Foundational
Guitars Have Feelings Too: A Method for Rural Guitarists
Foundational method on flatpicked rural guitar — analysis of Jim Baxter, Norman Blake, Maybelle Carter, Riley Puckett
Course
Complete Old-Time Guitar Transcriptions Bundle
140-tune eBook + video bundle — Blake, Puckett, Carter, Justice and more
Method Book
CRK's Cowboy Rhythm Essentials, Volume 1
Cowboy and Western rhythm guitar fundamentals — eBook + video
Course
Five Intermediate Trail Songs
Lesson package — eBook + video
Course
Five Underplayed Fiddle Tunes for Flatpicked Guitar
10 transcriptions, instructional video, 10 backing tracks
Course
Mother Maybelle Carter Guitar Lessons
23 Maybelle Carter transcriptions for beginner/intermediate — eBook + video
Course
The Guitar Playing of Riley Puckett
48 essential Riley Puckett transcriptions — eBook + video
Course
The Rhythm Playing of Norman Blake
21 essential Norman Blake backup-guitar transcriptions — eBook + video
Acoustic Guitar
Acoustic Guitar Magazine
AuthorArticle
Contributing writer — features and interviews on rural guitar, fingerstyle technique, and the pre-WWII Americana lineage
Fretboard Journal
Fretboard Journal
AuthorArticle
Contributing writer; podcast guest (episode 411)
The Nashville Collective
Liner notes — Fifty Years of Clown School
AuthorLiner Notes
Liner-note copy for Matt Combs's TNC001 release