Veteran Calgary bluesmen and harmonicist Bill Hills and guitarist Brother Ray Lemelin, originally from Quebec, kick off season five for the Thompson stop on the Borealis Trail for Home Routes/Chemin Chez Nous ("way home") Sept. 24 in Tim and Jean Cameron's living room at 206 Campbell Dr.
Other stops on the Borealis Trail 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.
Performers typically do 11 shows in 14 days at their stops along the Borealis Trail.
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.
Prince Edward Island singer-songwriter Dennis Ellsworth closed out the fourth season of Home Routes here April 13.
All concerts at the Cameron's place starts at 7:30 p.m. and tickets are $20. For more information give Tim or Jean a call at 204-677-3574 or send them an e-mail at: [email protected]. Home Routes moved into private home venues here last season - the more intimate format it uses in most communities - after spending its first three seasons in the Basement Bijou room of the Thompson Public Library.
"We took over from Lisa Evasiuk last year and have enjoyed being hosts here and meeting other music loving folks here," the Camerons said in an e-mail to friends of Home Routes in Thompson. "We have hosted in concerts in Ashern for three years prior to moving to Thompson." Tim Cameron is the province's chief natural resource officer, working for Manitoba Conservation and Water Stewardship. "Jean and I are volunteer hosts who provide musicians with some supper, a great living room filled with music lovers, and a bed to sleep in. All money collected go to the performers," says Tim.
Lemelin and Hills are well-know sidemen who released their first blues album as an acoustic duo, Neither Here Nor There, in 2009.
They are followed a month later on Oct. 24 by Teresa Doyle and her son, Patrick Bunston, from Bellevue in eastern Prince Edward Island. Both sides of Doyle's family have lived as subsistent farmers for six generations in eastern Prince Edward Island. Teresa Doyle sings an eclectic mix of Celtic and Gaelic jazz and folk from her 11 albums, including Song Road, which was launched July 4 at the Trailside Cafe and Inn on Main Street in Mount Stewart, P.E.I.
She has won three East Coast Music Awards (ECMAs), has two Juno nominations and received a 2007 Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award, worth $15,000, and awarded annually by the Canada Council for the Arts for outstanding artistic achievement by Canadian mid-career artists in the disciplines of dance, inter-arts, media arts, music, theatre, visual arts and writing and publishing. One award for music is given to one Canadian musician each year.
Home Routes kicked off in Thompson on Sept. 22, 2009 with a show by Corin Raymond and Sean Cotton, who make up The Undesirables.
Season three began Oct. 6, 2011 with guitar-playing songstress Carolyn Mark, the long-time host of the Hootenanny in Victoria every Sunday and founder of The Vinaigrettes, an all-girl surfy twang popster band.
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.
The chairperson is Derek Black, a three-decade veteran of the Winnipeg Folk Festival, including eight years as its board president. Black plays guitar and sings as well. The executive producer is Mitch Podolak and Tim Osmond is the artistic director.
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.
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."
