Michael Patrick Flanagan Smith

Folksinger, playwright and writer. He sings “I Just Believe in Christmas.”

Michael Patrick F. Smith is a folksinger, playwright and writer from Frederick, Maryland. He ran Baltimore’s Living Room Company from 1999 to 2005 and moved to New York in 2011 to stage his play Woody Guthrie Dreams at Theater for the New City. As a musician he records and performs as The Good Hand. His first book, The Good Hand: A Memoir of Work, Brotherhood, and Transformation in an American Boomtown (Viking, 2021), recounts his time as an oil field hand in Williston, North Dakota; he testified to a U.S. House subcommittee in May 2021, and his reporting has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post Magazine and The Guardian. He lives in central Kentucky.

Immediately I thought it should be sung by Michael Patrick Flanagan Smith.
Sarth Calhoun, on “I Just Believe in Christmas”

The Christmas song and the podcast

The idea for “I Just Believe in Christmas” came out of a Christmas Eve 2014 email exchange with my Brooklyn neighbors, and I immediately thought it should be sung by him. We recorded it at Figure 8 in August 2015 and released it that December as Catfish Calhoun and Friends; his acoustic demo is on my YouTube channel. On February 15, 2021 he was the guest on the sixth episode of Beautiful Tornado, “The Re-Enchantment of the World,” and played his covid-era songs live on the show.

The creditMichael Patrick Flanagan Smith sings lead on Sarth Calhoun’s “I Just Believe in Christmas” (Catfish Calhoun and Friends, 2015) and was the guest on Beautiful Tornado, episode 6, February 15, 2021.

My thoughts

The profile is from public sources, linked where they appear. What we made is the record on this site and the sources cited above.