John Allen
MC Laurie Stewart, who gave the audience several of her amusing jokes, led off by introducing Bill St Amand. Bill led with a guitar intro into Nobody Wants You When You’re Down and Out. Next was Leon Redbone’s amusing I Want To Be Seduced. “I’d like to find a woman who wouldn’t mind seducing me.” Lulu’s Back In Town followed and Bill finished with a swinging rhythm for The Blues My Naughty Sweetie Gives To Me, first recorded in 1919!
Shaye Wood and Jordan Caufield and his guitar quietly and pleasantly harmonized, beginning with Sugar Man by Sixto Rodriguez, followed by the 1997 hit Sex And Candy “this surely is a dream” by Marcy’s Playground and finished with Jordan’s own What They Don’t Know. Their first Homegrown; hopefully there’ll be more.
Doug Mitchell sang and played four original songs, starting with his insultingly humorous Donald Trump song, written out of anger; hope he doesn’t get sued. He introduced his next song “about a special fellow”, K’tanaxa Dan George. “So it grows, the legend of Dan George.” His next two were about living in the Kootenays. First came Better Get Used To It Folks, written after the forest fires last summer, a comment on climate change. Then “No matter what you do, it’s a part of you”, The Rocky Mountain View.
Two members of local group The Oak Republic, Ally Blake on electric violin and Shawn Robertson on guitar, played three wonderful instrumentals. The first two were Shawn’s own The Road and The Well. The violin and guitar were played to give an intricate and overlapping rich sound. In the first song the violin dominated, in the second the guitar was more prominent, with violin support. Ally announced that she learned some violin songs as a child from her grandfather in Northern Ireland. It was after she came to Kimberley, over ten happy years ago, that she again began to play the violin. She has certainly made wonderful progress. Both are very strong confident musicians. They completed their set with Led Zeppelin’s The Rain Song.
A pleasant Intermission in the Gallery gave a chance for the audience to mingle and snack.
Dave Carlson and Bud Decosse led off the second act deftly picking their way through three John Reischman (like Dave, a mandolin player) instrumentals. As usual, they joked back and forth a bit; something about Bud using bad language on the phone; hard to believe. Nesser was followed by Greenwood, then Salt Spring. Very fine.
A stylistic shift followed, with Singer Marian Tuson (her first time at Homegrown) and Kimberley’s pianist Arne Sahlen, a very pleasant duo. Marian only recently started singing again; she did well. They gave us four familiar standout traditional tunes, Part Of Your World from The Little Mermaid, then When You Wish Upon A Star from Disney’s 1940 Pinocchio and the Gershwins’ 1926 hit Someone To Watch Over Me . They finished on It’s A Wonderful World, with the audience joining in the refrain.
Erin Dalton and Ferdy Belland followed. Ferdy announced that he’d “last been on this stage 17 years ago”. They began with Tetris, “a metaphor for true love”. It was a boy and girl response song, with very fine harmony on the choruses. Erin played a little kazoo too! Killing The Blues “Leaves were falling down like embers in colors red and gold” had lovely harmony and excellent guitar rhythm. Their voices again worked well together in Paul Simon’s 1986 Boy In The Bubble “These are the days of miracle and wonder And don’t cry baby, don’t cry”. The lyrics sill ring true in 2018.
Emilio Regina was the final performer of the evening, on pleasantly relaxed piano with his very high voice not at all like that in his rock performances. Two of his own songs, Ode To Bowie and Fire Fly Blues were followed by a soulful delivery of rock singer and pianist (very fitting) Leon Russel’s A Song For You “I’m singing my song for you”, which ended the evening.
