CONCERT Ryan Cook’s Tribute to Hank Williams debuts at Harbourfront Theatre
Renowned Nova Scotia singersongwriter Ryan Cook and his band, The Drifting Cowboys, are bringing their acclaimed Hank Williams Tribute Show to Harbourfront Theatre in Summerside this evening.
The concert marks the show’s debut on Prince Edward Island. Cook is hot off the heels of a fiveday run at the Chester Playhouse in Chester, N.S., which saw him performing to full crowds each night.
“We here at the Chester Playhouse were delighted to have Ryan Cook perform a ‘Tribute To Hank Williams’,” says Roma Dingwell, general manager at the Chester Playhouse.
“Our five-day run gave capacity audiences the treat of going down memory lane as they shared an evening with Hank Williams and the Drifting Cowboys. It is a show not to be missed.”
The performance in Summerside is part of a larger tour that resulted from a showcase at Atlantic Presenter Association’s Contact East conference in 2017. Cook and company will be taking to stages in New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, P.E.I. and Newfoundland & Labrador in the coming months.
The two-act performance includes over 20 songs from the catalogue of one of the greatest country music singers of all time. Cook and The Drifting Cowboys reanimate the sounds of Don Helms’ haunting steel guitar, Jerry Rivers’ unmistakable fiddle arrangements and the yodelling of the lovesick boy from Georgiana, Luke the Drifter himself: Hank Williams.
Cook has been performing as Williams for nearly a decade, beginning in 2009 with several sold-out weeks starring in the Maynard Collins play, “The Show He Never Gave” in Sackville, N.B. He has also performed on iconic stages graced by the man himself, including Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium and Ernest Tubb’s Midnite Jamboree, and has thoroughly studied his life and times through biographies, museum exhibits and more.