At this festival, everybody gets the blues
Week of music keeps spreading the word about a sound that’s over a century old
It’s a musical style rooted in centuries-old traditions and made famous in the 1900s — and now the blues are taking over Saskatoon.
The 17th-annual Saskatoon Blues Festival kicks off at the end of February, with the headline performers taking the stage at The Bassment on Friday, March 1, and Saturday, March 2.
Saskatoon is not a huge music market in comparison to bigger cities across Canada, but the blues scene is a thriving one that puts together a week of performances and programming to help share the genre with the city.
“We get people coming out who have never heard the music before,” Saskatoon Blues Society president Kevin Shook said. “We expose them to it, they like what they hear, and they keep coming out.”
This year’s headline performers include Morgan Davis and Crystal Shawanda on Friday night, and on Saturday local duo Mama B & Freight Train will kick off the night for Amos Garrett and Harpdog Brown.
The week leading up to those main shows will be punctuated by the “lounge series,” with local blues performers playing in more casual settings throughout the downtown area. The first of the lounge series shows is set for Feb. 19 at Finn’s Irish Pub on Spadina Crescent.
For longtime Canadian blues musician and aficionado Morgan Davis, the intimate settings are what the blues are all about.
“I’ve never had rock star fantasies or dreams of playing arenas, because my music just doesn’t work there,” Davis said. “Back when the blues started, (it was) in little juice joints with 30, 40, 50 people.”
With a performing career spanning nearly 50 years and still going strong — his most recent album made Downbeat magazine’s list of 2018’s top albums — Davis has immersed himself in the blues community and its history. He said he felt compelled, throughout his career, to study the roots of blues music: from the early origins in African musical traditions, which later gave birth to blues and jazz in the United States and Canada during the late 1800s and early 1900s.
Blues music isn’t the same as pop or rock and roll, Morgan added. It’s not suited for huge stadiums and raucous crowds, and the music is “truer” in meaning and thought than some of the more modern genres.
“Today, we live in a very copycat world: one pop star has a hit and 10 other pop stars capitalize on that,” Davis said. “The blues was definitely … much more organic.”
And as part of the festival in Saskatoon, Davis will share some of that rich history with the public during a “History of the Blues” workshop at Amigos Cantina on Saturday, March 2. Though Davis said he can “only scratch the surface” during the two-hour workshop, Shook said it’s part of the festival that makes the experience in Saskatoon unique.
The community for the blues might be small, but Shook and Davis both said it’s mighty — and they expect the festival in Saskatoon to be a huge success.
“Blues fans are very diehard, and very loyal,” Davis said. “It’s a small audience … but all I need is 50 or 100 people, and we rock.”