Edmonton's Labatt Blues Festival 2000
FIVE-MAN JUMP-BLUES BAND This year’s Edmonton’s Labatt Blues Festival will begin with a performance by The Rockin’ Highliners, who can claim to be the most popular blues band in Canada. For the past two years, this five-piece, jump-blues unit has played between 200 and 250 dates a year, the vast majority of them in Canadian cities and towns from Sydney to Nanaimo. "The only time we get out of the van is to play somewhere where there is a crowd of people ready for us to rock," says vocalist Robert Tycholis. In fact, the demands of constant cross-country touring forced the band to relocate last year from Edmonton to the more centrally-located Toronto. The band has won a series of impressive Canadian awards. They won the Toronto Blues Society’s New Talent Search in 1997, they were named Best Group Recording Artist last year by the Alberta Recording Industry Association, and last year they were named Independent Recording Artist of the Year by COCA, the Canadian Association of Campus Activities, the organization of college and university talent bookers from across the country. The band even has a distinctly Canadian name. The band’s name is a Canadian frozen-fish variation on the name of one of the best jump-blues bands of the 1940s, Tiny Grimes and His Rockin’ Highlanders, an aggregation of black musicians who played in kilts. The Highliners are not popular only in this country. For the past two summers, they have toured Belgium and Holland. They have also played a variety of impressive venues in the United States: B.B. King’s in Memphis, the House of Blues in Chicago, the South by Southwest music showcase in Austin, Texas, and clubs in dozens of U.S. cities, including one of the fountainheads of blues music, Clarksdale, Mississippi. The band consists of Tycholis, a booming singer and charismatic front man, the powerhouse twin guitars of Clayton Sample and Greg "Junior" Demchuk, Chris Brzezicki on acoustic and electric bass, and the one non-Albertan in the band, Winnipeger Ken McMahon on drums. Robert, Clayton, and Ken have been with the band from its early days. Junior, who had been the guitarist in the Vancouver blues band The Twisters, joined the band last fall, and Chris rejoined the band (he was the original bassist) over the past winter. In 1999 The Rockin’ Highliners released their third CD, Oh My!, produced by master guitarist and producer Duke Robillard, who also played guitar on several cuts. This CD came out on Edmonton’s Stony Plain label and received international distribution, unlike the band’s first two CDs, Chicks, Suits, and Cadillacs (1996) and What Were You Thinking? (1998), both of which came out on the band’s own Square Dog label. The band will be making another CD for Stony Plain with Duke Robillard in the coming months. You don’t want to miss hearing this polished and potent band under the trees in Hawrelak Park late Friday afternoon, August 25!
(Lonnie Brooks, Long John Hunter, Phillip Walker) THREE GUITARISTS/VOCALISTS/SONGWRITERS Lone Star Shootout is a
blues-guitar celebration that takes its name from a CD made last year by three
veteran blues guitarists. Lonnie Brooks, Long John Hunter, and Phillip Walker all learned to play blues guitar and started performing in the booming oil port of Port Arthur in east Texas in the early 1950s, and all three have been playing the blues for a living ever since, though geographically they went different ways: Long John spent his career in Texas and Mexico, Lonnie went to Chicago, and Phillip moved to Los Angeles. So all three welcomed the chance to reminisce as well as play together when when they were invited by Alligator Records to make Lone Star Shootout. On the CD, they play tunes from their early days, when the guitar stylings of T-Bone Walker and Gatemouth Brown dominated the Texas blues scene. "If you couldn’t play Gatemouth tunes, you couldn’t get a job in Texas," Lonnie recalls in the CD liner notes. Lone Star Shootout was recorded in Austin with an all-star band of Texas blues musicians, led by Kaz Kazanoff on saxophone and harmonica, and was greeted with glowing reviews when it came out last summer. "This is magic. It’s an essential album," said Tom Hyslop of Blues Revue. Many compared it to the Grammy-winning Alligator CD of 1985, Showdown, which also brought together three Texas-style blues guitarists (Albert Collins, Johnny Copeland, and Robert Cray) in a relaxed, nostalgic setting. To promote the CD, Lonnie, Long John, and Phillip performed together last summer at eight selected blues festivals, to resounding acclaim: "high-energy, foot-stomping, good-time Texas blues," said Living Blues. Buoyed by this success, the trio has juggled their busy schedules so they can perform together at nine blues festivals this summer, including the Chicago Blues Festival in June, the Poconos Blues Festival in July, the Long Beach Blues Festival in September--and the Edmonton’s Labatt Blues Festival in August. And if the big and bold guitar work of these three men is not enough for you, they are touring this summer with the guitar-heavy Lonnie Brooks Band, which features Lonnie’s guitar-playing sons, Ronnie Baker Brooks and Wayne Baker Brooks, as well as Rusty Hall on keyboards, Dave "Biscuit" Miller on bass, and Pat Doody on drums. In their live shows, just as on their CD (and on the Showdown CD), the three men alternate between camaraderie and trying to cut each other to shreds. And, as on the CD (and as on Showdown), the configurations continually change: sometimes each will perform alone in front of the band, sometimes two men will do a song with the band, and sometimes all three and the band perform together. Lonnie is no doubt the best known of the three men. Under the name of Guitar Junior, he recorded some popular swamp-blues tunes in Louisiana in the late 1950s; one of them, "The Crawl," has become a bar-band standard after it was covered by The Fabulous Thunderbirds--another act at this summer’s Edmonton’s Labatt Blues Fest--in the late 1970s. He moved to Chicago in 1960, changed his recording name to Lonnie Brooks (his real name is Lee Baker, Jr.), and eventually became a recording star for the Alligator label and one of the most popular entertainers on the blues scene. As the title of his first Alligator album, Bayou Lightning, suggests, Lonnie’s sound is based in the hard-rocking Creole sound of the Gulf Coast; his band calls their style of playing "voodoo blues." Lonnie can also claim to be a blues authority: along with Cub Koda and his son Wayne Baker Brooks, he is the author of the book Blues for Dummies. Lonnie has not been to Edmonton for many years, unlike the other two members of Lone Star Shootout. Long John Hunter, the least known and recorded of the three, made his first visit to Edmonton last November, when he put on a wild and entertaining show for two nights at the Commercial Hotel with his touring band, The Bad News Blues Band. He and his band will be back at the Commercial Hotel this August. Long John made his name in Mexico. After learning his trade in Texas and recording a single for Duke Records in Houston in 1954, he moved to El Paso and then to Juarez, Mexico, right across the border, where he became a blues legend: he played all night every night at the Lobby Bar in Juarez for thirteen years, until the bar closed down in 1971. After playing in west Texas in the seventies and eighties, he finally became famous when he recorded a series of albums displaying his blazing fretwork in the 1990s: Ride with Me (1992), Border Town Legend (1996), and Swinging from the Rafters (1998), all on the Alligator label. Phillip Walker has visited Edmonton many times in recent years. He is not only a local favourite; he is widely regarded as one of the classiest blues guitarists alive. Guitar Player said of him in a recent story, "Big Texas blues meets West Coast cool in his playing. He roughs up B.B. King shouts, T-Bone Walker jumps, Cajun stomps, and Lowell Fulson swing with terse, cutting guitar." While he was still in his teens, Phillip spent three years touring the South in the mid-1950s as the guitarist in the band of Clifton Chenier, the founder of zydeco music. He moved to California in 1959, where he made a series of singles and albums of outstanding quality. From 1973 to 1989, he made four albums for producer Bruce Bromberg; one of his songs on his 1989 album Blues, "Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark," became the title track of a million-selling Robert Cray album. In the 1990s he recorded Big Blues from Texas for the JSP label in 1992 and two CDs for Black Top, Working Girl (1995) and I Got a Sweet Tooth (1997). This August, when they visit Edmonton, Phillip will be 63, Lonnie will be 66, and Long John will be 68--but if you see and hear them perform, you just won’t believe those figures.
'In Your Face Blues' A seminal Edmonton blues/rock band, it was 1970 when Hot Cottage first started playing together. Guitarist Steve Boddington, drummer Lyndsey Umrysh and bassist Brian Koehli have been there from the start, and these days are joined by keys player Mike Yuzwenko and vocalist Del Kunitz. Although the band had its share of hall parties, gigs at the legendary Hovel, and even recorded an album with the great Walter "Shakey" Horton in 1972, work for a blues/rock band in Edmonton was not the sort of job you could build a "life" on. And, life does go on. All the members of the group have careers, but a love for music has kept them tight over the decades. "We’ve met and rehearsed every Monday night for over 10 years", drummer Umrysh told me not too long ago. Over the past 3 years the band has resurfaced, gigging at a number of spots around town, doing a few hall parties and generally proving that music, and especially the blues, is not just a young mans game. Now, an album is in the works, a few opportunities to play are opening up, and Edmonton blues lovers, old and young, are grooving to the sounds put out by Hot Cottage. Edmontons’ Labatt Blues Festival is proud to present Hot Cottage as the opening act on our Saturday schedule. For this performance Hot Cottage will be joined by the 4 piece "Craft" horn section for a high energy launch to Saturdays’ festivities
GUITARIST/VOCALIST/SONGWRITER Bryan Lee has been playing tough blues guitar for almost all of his 57 years, but he will always be best known for his fourteen-year house gig at the Old Absinthe House Bar on Bourbon Street in New Orleans. Five nights a week, Bryan and his band The Jump Street Five played hard-driving, straightahead blues in the small, historic bar (the mahogany bar itself was 200 years old). They soon built up a loyal following of blues fans, and visitors to town learned that the Old Absinthe was one place where real blues could be heard. Soon rock and blues legends such as Eric Clapton, Sting, Robert Plant, James Cotton, and Johnny Winter took to hanging out at the club and sitting in with the band. A thirteen-year-old Kenny Wayne Shepherd had his first experience of playing onstage when he sat in with Bryan and his band. Sadly, the club changed ownership in 1997, and the new owner converted it into a take-out daiquiri bar. But the special quality of Bryan’s shows at the Old Absinthe have been captured on his two CDs of the past two years, Live at the Old Absinthe House Bar . . . Friday Night and Live at the Old Absinthe Bar . . . Saturday Night, both on the Justin Time label. These two CDs were recorded on the weekend of February 14 and 15, 1997, just before the bar closed, and have several guest artists, including James Cotton and Kenny Wayne Shepherd. Bryan soon found another house gig in New Orleans, at the Opera House on Bourbon Street, and he and his band put out a new studio album in the spring of this year, Crawfish Lady, also on Justin Time. Bryan’s funky guitar, the grooves of his long-time organist Marc Adams, and the infectious drumming of Sammy Neal, former drummer for zydeco ace Chubby Carrier, give this CD a strong New Orleans flavour. Bryan Lee was born in the small mill town of Two Rivers, Wisconsin. His eyes were damaged at birth, and by the age of eight he was completely blind. His main activity as a boy was music, and by the time he was ten he was spending every night playing his guitar to the blues and rhythm and blues songs he heard on the radio on WLAC from Nashville, Tennessee. After making his way as a musician in Spokane and Milwaukee, drawn by the power of New Orleans music and realizing that it would be relatively easy for a blind man to navigate in the compact French Quarter, he moved there in 1982, and on his birthday, March 16, 1983, he began his legendary house gig at the Old Absinthe. In 1991 he released his first album, The Blues Is . . ., on Montreal’s jazz label Justin Time, and this CD has been followed by six more on Justin Time. These albums gained him recognition from blues fans around the world and glowing reviews from Living Blues and other leading blues magazines. Bryan and his band played Edmonton’s Commercial Hotel in the summer of 1996, and people are still talking about his polished, high-energy live show. Check it out this summer down at Hawrelak Park!
GUITARIST/SINGER/SONGWRITER Debbie Davies is a guitar-slinger who learned her trade by playing four years as second guitarist in the band of the late and great Albert Collins. "She can stand up to any guitarist--male or female," Collins said of her playing, and her tough, driving style of blues won her the W.C. Handy Award as female contemporary blues artist of the year in 1997. Debbie has released five CDs in her own name, the latest being Tales from the Austin Motel, which came out last year on the Shanachie label and has her playing with Stevie Ray Vaughan’s former rhythm section, drummer Chris Layton and bass player Tommy Shannon. Debbie is one of several exciting female guitar-slingers who have come onto the blues scene in the past decade. Her friends Deborah Coleman (who headlined at last year’s Edmonton’s Labatt Blues Festival) and Joanna Connor are two others, and Bonnie Raitt was an inspiration to Debbie Davies when Debbie was growing up in California in the sixties and seventies. By 1985, Debbie joined the all-female band Maggie Mayall and the Cadillacs, led by the wife of British blues legend John Mayall. That’s where Albert Collins first saw her play, and that led to her joining his band, The Icebreakers, in 1988. After four years of touring and recording with Albert Collins, she left in 1991 to form her own band. Albert Collins was a guest artist on her first CD, Picture This of 1993, which came out on the Blind Pig label, as did her next two CDs, Loose Tonight and I Got That Feeling. 1998 was a significant year for Debbie. In May, she won the W.C. Handy Award as female contemporary blues artist of 1997--and became the first white woman and the first guitar player to do so. In that year she also switched record labels and released a CD, ‘Round Every Corner, on her new label, Shanachie. Not only did she issue her own CD Tales from the Austin Motel in 1999; she also was part of two other CDs released last year, Grand Union, recorded with guitar aces Anson Funderburgh (also a headliner at this year’s Edmonton’s Labatt Blues Fest) and Otis Grand, and Homesick, where she joins up with two more hot guitarists, Kenny Neal and Tab Benoit, and Ronnie Earl’s band The Broadcasters. Her performance at this year’s Edmonton’s Labatt Blues Fest will be her first in Edmonton, and she’ll be bringing her own trio, consisting of herself on guitar and drummer (and frequent songwriting collaborator) Don Castagno and bassist Alan Hager. She performs some 200 nights a year on the road with this unit, so you can expect a polished and powerful show from them.
Harmonica and Vocals James Harman has been fronting his own bands since he was 16 years old. In the 38 years since then he has staked a claim as truly original, legitimate and talented blues artist. Harman is also a very talented songwriter, chronicling the musicians’ life in his songs with energy, wit and humour. He has a novelists’ eye for detail and irony, and the result is well conceived music that stands the test of time. In fact his song "Walk Around Telephone Blues" is currently up for a W.C. Handy award as blues song of the year. What will we hear Saturday evening when the James Harman band takes the stage ? The music of the James Harman Band pre-dates rock’n’roll guitar heroes or blues rock power trios. As Harman notes proudly it is "Strictly the blues". Music that while original, is drenched in the older stylistic flavors of blues, R&B, and masters such as Sonny Boy Williamson, Big Walter Horton and others. Harman and Co. have polished their skills to become modern-day blues performers who know the difference between innovation and imitation. Harman never lets the listener forget the he is a disciple of the classic qualities of the Southern blues tradition, but his own character clearly shines through. In all cases, Harman remains true to his credo: Strictly The Blues. It has been nearly a dozen years since James Harman last performed in Edmonton, on a sweat drenched night at the old City Media Club where the jamming lasted until the wee hours with the late, great Big Miller and Pinetop Perkins with Little Mike and the Tornadoes. That performance was indelibly etched on the minds of all who were in attendance. It is our pleasure to welcome James Harman back to Edmonton, and the stage of Edmontons’ Labatt Blues Festival
FIVE-MAN BLUES-ROCK BAND The Fabulous Thunderbirds will close Saturday night at this year’s Edmonton’s Labatt Blues Festival doing what they have done so well for the past twenty five years, blasting out hard-rocking fifties-style roadhouse blues. "For Texas blues, the T-Birds are still the last word in sass, flash, and low-down raunch," said The Fort Worth Star-Telegram of the band’s live show last year. The T-Birds began life in 1975 in Austin, Texas, when Kim Wilson, the virtuoso harmonica-player who remains the band’s vocalist, frontman, and main songwriter, and lean-and-mean guitarist Jimmie Vaughan, older brother of Stevie Ray, joined forces. They named the band after the Ford Thunderbird, the long and low-slung car that was considered so cool and sexy in the 1950s. From the start, the band played a distinctive mix of Texas, swamp, and Chicago blues, with a healthy dash of Tex-Mex rhythms and a jolt of rock-and-roll intensity. After being the house band at Antone’s club in Austin, where they backed up the likes of Muddy Waters and Albert King, they became recording stars in their own right after their first album, self-titled but better known by its cover slogan, "Girls Go Wild," came out in 1979. After fifteen years of mounting success, and seven albums, the band faltered badly when Jimmie Vaughan left in 1990. The T-Birds took on two guitarists in his place, Duke Robillard (lead) and Kid Bangham (rhythm), but by 1993 Duke Robillard had left, their CD Walk That Walk, Talk That Talk (1991) had disappointed many of their fans, and Kim Wilson had moved into several solo projects. In these years Kim put out two CDs of his own, Tigerman (1993) and That’s Life (If You Call It Living) (1994), and founded his own record label, called--significantly--Blue Collar Music. In 1995, Kim decided to revive the Fabulous Thunderbirds. As guitarist he chose Kid Ramos, the muscular and pompadoured guitarist who had played seven years in the band of James Harman (who performs right before the T-Birds Saturday night at the blues fest); he also decided to add a piano player to the guitar-and-harmonica sound of the T-Birds and called on Gene Taylor, originally from Toronto but best known as a members of The Blasters. On bass he brought in Willie J. Campbell from Harman’s band, and longtime T-Birds drummer Fran Christina returned. The new T-Birds put out a well-received CD in 1995, Roll of the Dice, and began touring. This is the version of the T-Birds that closed out the Jazz City festival in Edmonton three summers ago, and this is the line-up that will perform this August in Hawrelak Park--with one change: California veteran Richard Innes is now the band’s drummer.
GUITARIST/VOCALIST/SONGWRITER Winnipeg’s Big Dave McLean and Calgary’s Tim Williams, the two foremost country-blues performers in Canada today, will start off Sunday’s line-up at this year’s blues fest with the festival’s only acoustic set. And then, as if to illustrate the history of the blues, the two will drop their acoustic instruments, plug in electric guitars, and play a rousing set of ensemble blues with Tim’s three-man backing band, which features keyboard ace Ron Casat, Suitcase James on bass, and drummer Kevin Belzner. Big Dave and Tim both came to the blues in the mid-1960s, inspired by the records and performances of "rediscovered" country bluesmen like Mississippi John Hurt and Son House. Each man, Dave in Wiinipeg and Tim in southern California, quickly moved from being a fan to being a country-blues performer himself, and each has spent thirty-plus years making a living as a blues musician. The two men are good friends and made a two-man acoustic CD together in 1998, Fellow Travellers. On it, they take turns on the vocals, and Big Dave plays guitar and harmonica, while Tim performs on guitar, mandolin, and banjo. Many Edmontonians will remember their deep-blues show at the Sidetrack Cafe in the summer of 1998, backed up by Tim’s band, when they toured after this CD was released. Big Dave, with his husky voice, slashing slide guitar, and emotional delivery, is a downhome bluesman in the mould of the early Muddy Waters. His first recording, in fact, was entitled Muddy Waters for President; it is a tape of a live show by Dave and his band The Muddytones at Bud’s on Broadway in Saskatoon in 1989, and after being sold for years as a cassette at his gigs, it has now been re-released on CD. One song from that CD, Dave’s original composition "TV Preacher," made a memorable cut on the Stony Plain anthology of Canadian blues, Saturday Night Blues, in 1991, and Big Dave and his band performed four songs on the live compilation of Winnipeg blues entitled Wang Dang Doodle, recorded in 1996. But his big break came in 1998, when Stony Plain released his album, For the Blues . . . "Always," a collection of downhome blues standards such as "Dust My Broom" and "Just Your Fool" (along with one original, the title track). The CD was produced by Colin James, who is only one of the host of younger prairie bluesmen who grew up with Big Dave as their primary role model. Tim, whose blues style is more gentle, melodic, and understated than Dave’s, made his first album, Blues Full Circle, in Los Angeles for the Epic label in 1968, when he was twenty; two blues greats, guitarist Pee Wee Crayton and harp-player George "Harmonica" Smith, played in his band on the record. After moving to Vancouver in the 1970s, Tim settled in Calgary in the 1980s. He has been busy in the nineties: he plays some 275 dates a year; he released two CDs of acoustic blues, Riverboat Rendezvous (1995) and Indigo Incidents (1997), both containing striking original songs; in the early 1990s he was part of the Alberta acoustic trio Triple Threat (along with harp-player Rusty Reed and guitarist Johnny V--their CD Terra Firma Boogie has just been reissued); he is making his first tour of England and Scotland in June and July of this year; a live CD, capturing Tim performing solo and acoustic, will be out later this year. Tim has proved that, if you are good enough and determined enough, you can make a living as an acoustic bluesman in Alberta.
GUITARIST/VOCALIST/SONGWRITER
The Wolfman’s soaring, deep-soul vocals and funky, choked guitar sound are immediately recognizable. And like Fats Domino, Professor Longhair, and many other New Orleans notables, he has a colourful nickname, the result of missing front teeth and prominent eye teeth. "Just like the vampires be looking, that’s the way I be looking," he says. The Wolfman has had his seven-piece band, The Roadmasters, for some fifteen years, and three of the Roadmasters--drummer Wilbert "Junk Yard Dog" Arnold, bass-player (and songwriter and co-arranger) Jack Cruz, and saxophonist Tom Fitzpatrick--have been with him from the start. Two other Roadmasters, trumpeter Larry Carter and trombonist Dave Woodard, joined in the early 1990s, and keyboardist Luca Fredericksen is the most recent addition. The Wolfman’s expressive vocals and jazzy guitar lines mesh perfectly with the churning, horn-dominated sound of the Roadmasters. The over-all effect is of a gleaming, well-oiled blues machine that blends soul, gospel, and funk with straight blues. The Wolfman was born in New Orleans in 1943, and by 1960 he had become proficient enough to go on the road as the guitarist in the band of his cousin, the popular R & B vocalist Ernie K-Doe. In these years he became a pupil and later the favourite accompanist of the great New Orleans singer Johnny Adams. For more than twenty years, Walter toured and performed with Johnny Adams. Walter plays lyrical and eloquent backing guitar on four of Johnny’s albums on Rounder in the 1990s, Room with a View of the Blues, Good Morning, Heartache, From the Heart, and Johnny’s superb final album, Man of My Word, released within weeks of his death from cancer in 1998. Johnny Adams brought Walter to the Rounder label, where the Wolfman recorded three albums in the late 1980s, Wolf Tracks, Out of the Dark, and Wolf at the Door. Walter also learned from Johnny how to be a creative and fluid vocalist; he admits his characteristic soaring falsetto is something he learned from Johnny. Walter and his band produced several exciting albums in the 1990s: the Ray-Charles-influenced Sada on Pointblank in 1991, Blue Moon Rising, recorded in Europe with James Brown’s horn section, the J.B. Horns (Maceo Parker, Pee Wee Ellis, and Fred Wesley) in 1994, and Funk Is in the House, a heady brew of furious funk and soul on Rounder’s subsidiary label Bullseye in 1997. The band’s most recent album, On the Prowl, released earlier this year on the Bullseye label, has been greeted with high praise for its "fiery, skintight ensemble sound . . . an overall level of performance that places Wolfman at the top of the class as a contemporary urban blues guitarist and vocalist" (John Sinclair in Living Blues). This band will have people on their feet and dancing come August in Hawrelak Park!
VOCALIST
Shemekia (pronounced Sha-MEE-ka) is just twenty-one, and when her first and only CD, Turn the Heat Up, appeared on the Alligator label two years ago, it was greeted with rapturous acclaim. Living Blues named Shemekia Best New Artist in its annual awards for 1998 and declared, "Her promise is as limitless as her talent." "A blues singing natural . . . gripping and growling voice, spirited and compelling gospel-inflected deep blues," said the Downbeat reviewer, and Jazz Times declared, "This 19-year-old earthshaker is continuing the lineage of Big Mama Thornton and Koko Taylor, but with her own vibrant twist . . . a full-tilt roar with blast-furnace intensity." Shemekia is the daughter of the late and great Texas blues guitarist Johnny Clyde Copeland, and she became a blues singer after her father was diagnosed with congenital heart failure in early 1995 and forced to take some months of rest. When he returned to performing, he began taking his sixteen-year-old daughter on the road with him, using her as a back-up singer and occasional vocalist. Before long, she was delivering an entire opening set--and often stealing the show. Shemekia says, however, that her father was helping her just as much as she was helping him during the two years that they toured together. "He brought me along, I think, just so I could get more comfortable singing in front of people. Dad wanted me to think I was helping him out by opening his shows when he was sick, but, really, he was doing it all for me. He would go out and do gigs so I would get known." Shemekia’s live shows led to her making Turn Up the Heat. Performing with a band led by Jimmy Vivino, guitarist and bandleader for the Late Night TV show, she laid down a number of memorable songs, including her on-stage theme song (and show opener) "Big Lovin’ Woman," which she co-wrote; one of her father’s songs, "Ghetto Child"; the slow burner "Salt in My Wounds," a song she performed onscreen in the 1999 movie Three To Tango; and a cover of the soul standard "Have Mercy." Sadly, Johnny Copeland died at the age of 60 in July, 1997 while the CD was being recorded, and the CD is dedicated to him. Shemekia recorded a second CD for Alligator this spring; with luck, it should be released by the time she visits Edmonton in late August. All reports say that Shemekia’s CD, fine as it is, is as nothing compared to her live shows. She regularly gets a standing ovation in mid-set when she moves to the front of the stage and sings "Ghetto Child" without mike straight to the audience. She will be performing at the blues fest with her touring band, which contains some of New York’s finest blues players: the flamboyant female keyboardist Dona Oxford, guitarist Arthur Nielson, and a rhythm section of Barry Harrison on drums and Eric King on bass. Anyone who enjoyed E.C. Scott’s charismatic show at last summer’s Edmonton’s Labatt Blues Fest will not want to miss this young blues diva.
featuring Sam Myers GUITARIST AND VOCALIST/HARP-PLAYER Anson Funderburgh and the Rockets, featuring Sam Myers, has been one of the most distinctive, hard-rocking, and successful blues bands on the scene for the past fifteen years. They have won the W.C. Handy Award as Blues Band of the Year three times, in 1987, 1992, and 1994, and they are the only band to play every year at the King Biscuit Blues Festival in Helena, Arkansas, since its inception in 1986. Now this band, which plays more than 200 dates a year in the United States and Europe, will make its first appearance in Edmonton at this year’s Edmonton’s Labatt Blues Festival. What makes the band’s sound so special is the combination of razor-sharp Texas guitar, provided by Funderburgh, and the down-home Mississippi vocals and harmonica of Sam Myers. Funderburgh got into the blues in the early 1960s when he was in grade school in the Dallas suburb of Plano, Texas. His mother bought him an electric guitar, and the woman she bought it from threw in a box of singles. The box contained Freddy King’s "Hideaway," Albert Collins’s "Sno-Cone," and Bill Doggett’s "Honky Tonk," Anson recalls. "When I heard ‘Hideaway,’ I thought, This is the stuff." Anson founded The Rockets in 1978, along with his friend Darrell Nulisch, and the Rockets played a large role in the blues resurgence in Texas at the time, along with The Fabulous Thunderbirds (also headliners at this year’s Edmonton’s Labatt Blues Festival) and Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble. When Anson and the Rockets played at a small club in Jackson, Mississippi in 1982, Sam Myers, a blues veteran who had made his first recording some twenty-five years earlier, sat in with the band. Soon Anson and Sam were fast friends, and by 1984 they released an album together, My Love Is Here To Stay. In 1986, Darrell Nulisch, who had been the Rockets’ vocalist and harmonica-player for more than seven years, left the band, and Sam joined the band as his replacement and moved to Dallas. The first album by the new band, Sins, won the 1987 Handy Award as Album of the Year; that same year the band won a Handy as Band of the Year, and Sam’s song "Changing Neighborhoods" won the Handy as Song of the Year. Sam, who is now 66, and who is legally blind, started out as a trumpet-player, and he believes this has influenced his style of harp-playing. By the age of ten, he switched to drums, and he played drums off and on for more than ten years for Elmore James. In 1960 and 1961, when the young Anson was learning to play "Hideaway," Sam recorded in New Orleans with Elmore James. Elmore played slide on four sides by Sam, including his most famous song, "Angel Child," and Sam played harmonica on several Elmore tunes, including the classic "Look on Yonder’s Wall." The Rockets at this time consists of Anson, Sam, drummer Danny Cochran (who has been with the band for ten years), stand-up-bass player J.P. Whitefield (the original bassist in The Fabulous Thunderbirds), and the newest member of the band, keyboardist John Street. This is the line-up on the band’s most recent CD, Change in My Pocket, which came out last year on the Bullseye label--and this is the line-up that will perform this August at the Edmonton’s Labatt Blues Fest. [Contact Us] [Blues Links] [Past Festivals] [Sponsors] [Home]
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