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Musician John Wort Hannam at Home Routes March 13

Alberta’s John Wort Hannam is next up on Thompson’s Home Routes music circuit March 13. Tickets are $15 per person.

Hannam is from the prairies of southern Alberta and has been compared to Gordon Lightfoot, James Keelaghan and John Prine. For five years, he was a full-time schoolteacher teaching Grade 9 language arts on the Kainai First Nation, the largest reserve in Canada and part of the Blackfoot Confederacy.

Hannam has been nominated for a Juno Award this year in the Roots and Traditional category. The 39th annual Juno Awards are in St. John’s April 18.

In 1997 he heard a Loudon Wainwright III record and was hooked by the music and the stories. In 1998 he bought a guitar and learnt some chords and in 2002 he quit teaching to be a working musician. He recently recorded his fourth CD “Queen’s Hotel,” released this fall.

He was also the grand prize winner last year of the Calgary Folk Music Festival songwriting competition.

Homes Routes is a not-for-profit organization. The chairperson is Derek Black, a 25-year veteran of the Winnipeg Folk Festival, including eight years as its board president. Black plays guitar and sings as well.

Other board members include Chris White, artistic director of the Ottawa Folk Festival, who is also a songwriter; Troy Greencorn, artistic director of the Stan Rogers Folk Festival in Canso, Nova Scotia; Manitoban Steve Schellenberg, a songwriter who is the artist representative on the board; Robert Lyons of Regina, an owner of nightclubs and restaurants, who is also described as “a very decent lyricist and guitar player and an old hand at producing house concerts” and Les Siemieniuk, general manager of the Calgary Folk Festival and a long-time broadcaster including producing CBC Radio’s Simply Folk.

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