Songwriter and guitarist promotes music through work at Lincoln Center

Greensboro, North Carolina is more than 8,000 miles from Liuzhou, China. But when Justin Poindexter (HS ’01, BM ‘06) has a guitar in his hands, the two worlds are only a song away.

In 2014, Poindexter and his band, The Amigos (now Silver City Bound), were selected by the U.S. State Department to participate in the American Music Abroad program, a diplomatic mission that’s been sending American artists overseas since the days of Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman. Poindexter and his bandmates — who play everything from bluegrass to folk to New Orleans zydeco — played 200 shows across 6 countries and 20 states as goodwill cultural ambassadors.

In every far-flung city they visited, Poindexter and The Amigos worked with local guides and translators to find the best musicians and invite them to play together. In Myanmar, villagers arrived with Burmese harps, a traditional stringed instrument. In Cambodia, The Amigos collaborated with classically trained musicians. But one of the most surreal and remarkable moments of the tour came on the streets of Liuzhou, a Chinese city of three million people on the banks of the Liu River.

“A group of ethnic Chinese students approached us,” says Poindexter, “and they didn’t speak Cantonese or Mandarin, so our translator was useless. But they could say one thing in English, ‘Country Roads.’”

The Amigos launched into the John Denver classic about the singer’s roots in the Blue Ridge Mountains, and the smiling Chinese students — a choir, it turns out, dressed in traditional garb — joined in the chorus. You have to see the video to believe it.