Country bluesman Morgan Davis is in Thompson tonight for a 7:30 p.m. show to kick-off season six of Home Routes house concerts at Tim and Jean Cameron’s place at 206 Campbell Dr. Tickets are $20 at the door and the coffee will be on, says Tim Cameron, now in his third season of organizing Thompson stops on the tour. For more information give Tim or Jean a call at 204-677-3574 or send them an e-mail at: cameron8@mymts.net
Home Routes, then hosted by Lisa Evasiuk, a youth counsellor for school-based programs for the Addictions Foundation of Manitoba in Thompson, had at its original venue Thompson venue in the Basement Bijou at Thompson Public Library, kicking off in here on Sept. 22, 2009 with a show by Corin Raymond and Sean Cotton, who make up The Undesirables. Today marks five years and a day since Home Routes arrived in Thompson. Evasiuk, originally from Dauphin, had lived here since 1985, but retired and left town in August 2012 to travel the world, although there have been occasional sightings of her locally over the last two years on a visit back.
All the money goes to the performers, some of whom would likely never pass through Thompson without the concert series. Performers typically do 11 shows in 14 days at their stops along Home Routes Borealis Trail circuit in Northern Saskatchewan and Manitoba, which Thompson is part of . Other stops on the Borealis Trail beside Thompson include Flin Flon, The Pas and Minitonas and Swan River Valley in Manitoba and in Saskatchewan, Buena Vista, Annaheim, Prince Albert, Napatak, Melfort and Greenwater Lake Provincial Park. Other circuits on Home Routes include the Yukon Trail; Salmon-Berry in British Columbia; Cherry Bomb and Blue Moon in British Columbia and Alberta; Chautauqua Trail in Saskatchewan and Alberta; CCN SK in Saskatchewan; Central Plains in Saskatchewan and Manitoba; Jeanne Bernardin in Manitoba, Agassiz in Manitoba and Ontario; Estelle-Klein in Ontario and Québec and the Maritimes in New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island.
Davis “called last night from The Pas and is having a great time on the tour. He is looking forward to his Thompson concert tonight,” Cameron said in an e-mail this morning. Davis, a Nova Scotia resident since 2001 and Juno award-winner is here to bring his brand of country blues to Northern Manitoba. Davis lives north of Deep Cove, on the Aspotogan Peninsula, along the Lighthouse Route of Nova Scotia’s South Shore.The Aspotogan Peninsula is in the eastern part of Lunenburg County, situated between St. Margarets Bay in the east from Mahone Bay in the west. Davis is a regular weekend performer at the legendary Bearly’s House of Blues and Ribs, established in 1987, on Barrington Street in south end downtown Halifax.
Two more Home Routes house concerts follow at the Cameron’s place in October and November and then resume in February following a Christmas holiday hiatus.
Tim and Jean Cameron moved here from Ashern three years ago. The Camerons were also Home Routes hosts in Ashern for three years before coming here. Tim’s day job is as a uniformed armed peace officer with Manitoba Conservation and Water Stewardship – the province’s chief natural resource officer. Jean Cameron is the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC) branch manager here.
Tim is also known as a guitar-playing folkie from the late 1980s, whose talents were on display at the long-defunct Thompson Folk Festival, during an earlier stint working and living here in his 20s. Tim picked up a guitar for a few songs after the Randy Noojin show last Nov. 22, joining local musician Russell Peters and Noojin for a Hank Williams kitchen party sing-along. Attendance for shows in their mobile home venue over the last two years ranged from a low of 22 to a very cozy, getting-to-know-you better 45.
Originally from Detroit, Davis grew up listening to a mix of rhythm and blues and the likes of Jimmy Reed, Ike and Tina Turner, Chuck Berry and Fats Domino. He later moved to California with his family, and then in 1968 left for Canada, where he lived at the now-iconic counter-culture Rochdale College, Toronto’s mecca for the subculture of the late 1960s, where he immersed himself in the study of Delta Blues, especially the music of Robert Johnson, he says.
It was in the early 1970’s Toronto music scene that Davis made the journey from apprentice to musical journeyman, having the opportunity to see and play with such legendary performers as Bukka White, Johnny Shines, Sunnyland Slim, Snooky Pryor, Hubert Sumlin, and John Hammond, who, he says, were “encouraging supporters.”
Davis hit the road with the Rhythm Rockets, The Knights of The Mystic Sea, and David Wilcox’s first band, David Wilcox and the Teddy Bears, before eventually forming his own trio. He has since performed in full bands, trios and mainly as a solo artist. Over the years, Davis has opened for Willie Dixon, John Lee Hooker, Albert King, Hammond, Albert Collins and Eric Bibb.
Home Routes Inc. (also known as Home Routes/Chemin Chez Nous) is a national non-profit arts organization incorporated in February 2007 to create new performance opportunities for Canadian musicians and audiences, in the homes of volunteer house concert presenters organized in touring circuits through rural and urban, French and English communities in Canada. A national volunteer board of directors operates the arts-service and arts-delivery organization, along with a small professional staff in Winnipeg and more than 200 volunteer house concert hosts across Canada.
Home Routes says it “owes its existence to the theoretical footprint of the Chautauqua travelling shows of the late 19th and 20th century.”
The Chautauqua movement was named after the Chautauqua Lake Sunday School Assembly founded in New York State in 1874 as an educational experiment in out-of-school, vacation learning. It was broadened almost immediately beyond courses for Sunday school teachers to include academic subjects, music, art and physical education.
“In the time before radio the Chautauqua was the cultural conduit between the urban east and the rest of North America. Traveling by horse and wagon, the Chautauqua was ‘The Medicine Show’ bringing the latest in show tunes, science, the gospel, fashion, snake oil and whatever was the latest invention for the modern kitchen. Almost every community had a ‘Chautauqua Society’ laying the groundwork locally and producing the show. The arrival in any rural community of the annual Chautauqua was a big event that was celebrated across the continent and even today, almost a hundred years later, the word “Chautauqua” still reverberates in existing concert venues and in cultural and educational institutions.
The travelling shows disappeared as radio and the movies grew in prominence and those mini extravaganzas became a wistful lingering memory in North American history.
“The modern folk music ‘House Concert’ was born out of necessity in the early 1950’s just at the time when the folk ‘boom’ began. In 1952 The Weavers had a number one radio hit with Leadbelly’s ‘Irene Goodnight’ and the song ignited a mini folk song revival; suddenly folk music was popular. City people started buying banjo’s and guitars and fiddles and began to learn the folklore that country people were born with and they began to create new songs about the world as they saw it then and ever since. There simply weren’t enough places to play for all the young and enthusiastic men and women who decided that being folk musicians was for them and so the grass roots invented a grass roots solution to the problem. People discovered that their living rooms made fine venues for acoustic music and began what has turned out to be a long tradition of home based intimate presentations of folk music.
What has been consistent has been the extraordinary level of excellence.
“Home Routes is a rough amalgam of these two historical approaches formulated and delivered with respect for all the work that went before we came along and re-kindled these excellent ideas. The volunteer hosts, like the Chautauqua Societies before them, play the role of community cultural animator. The musicians, like musicians and vaudevillians have for all time, get to work and play for these very special networks of vibrant committed people. The inter relationship between performer and host provides community after community with access to a brilliant array of artists. There is a trade off inherent between the parties, the artist brings their musical skills and the host contributes the effort to bring out an audience. One doesn’t work without the other. The thought of “circuits” of house concerts flows logically from the experience of the Chautauqua and equally from the current needs of the communities and of the artists.”
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