One of the world’s greatest living bluesmen will appear at The Martin Hotel this Saturday. Tickets for the 7 PM show, which was confirmed mere days ago, cost only $10, with all proceeds
going to the musician.
Paul Geremia has been a working musician for forty-three years. He plays finger-style country blues on 6- and 12-string guitars, accompanied at times by mouth harp and verse sung like he means it.
Something of a purist, Geremia plays with high fidelity to the masters – Robert Johnson, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Mississippi John Hurt, Howlin’ Wolf, Charlie Patton, and scores of others. In a life on the road, he has managed to dodge mainstream fame and fortune, while racking up more miles, friends, and musical accomplices than anyone but perhaps Ramblin’ Jack Elliot or Woodie Guthrie. Geremia is definitely in it for the music.
Besides playing the masters, Geremia writes original material, and has recorded about a dozen solo albums. His idiosyncratic style celebrates crooked beats, and musical quotes, asides, and humor. Some of the lyrics are pretty funny, too.
Between songs, Geremia likes to share his views on life, the times, and particularly the history of the blues. Things never get too dry or academic, though, because the stories are all so personal. Geremia has at some point played or recorded with every country blues picker from Piedmont to the Delta, it seems.
Geremia is himself a third-generation Italian American hailing from Providence, Rhode Island – the Providence Delta,” he likes to joke. Unusually for a “blues legend” of his stature, Geremia books his own shows, tours alone, and stays mostly with friends. He learned about the Martin from Roy Book Binder, who apparently described it as the best venue in the entire West.
We couldn’t agree more, and hope a good crowd will turn out, despite the last-minute notice, to appreciate one of the all-time greats in a rare West Coast appearance. The show is Saturday, May 30, 7 PM at the Martin Hotel on Railroad Street. Tickets are $10, and available now at the Martin, or at Nature’s Corner on Winnemucca Blvd.
Swingin’ tunes! Cowboy crooning! Award winning yodeling! Timeless humor! Yes folks, all this and more can be yours at the only show on the planet where you can witness a man in a ten gallon hat, yodel, play accordion, dance a jig and twirl a lariat – all at the same time.
Sagebrush artist, Sourdough Slim, transport us to a whimsical, infectious world where vaudevillian camp and cowboy lore intermingle. With a repertoire of classic western songs and an exuberant, animated, crowd pleasing delivery, Sourdough Slim has become one of the most popular cowboy entertainers of our time.
The East Bay Express calls him “The most entertaining cowboy singer-yodeler-accordionist extant.” The Allentown Morning Call proclaims him to be a “One-man Western extravaganza!” And the music director at the Carnegie Hall Folk Festival commented, “Spectacular! His ability to entertain, charm and educate a New York audience was nothing short of amazing.” From the moment this accordion squeezin’ Will Rogers swaggers on stage, it’s apparent to everyone that they’re in for a rollicking good time.
A well traveled veteran of stages ranging from The National Cowboy Gathering in Elko, Nevada to the Lincoln Center’s recent Roots of American Music Festival, Slim provides accordion, guitar, harmonica and a generous helping of the truly astounding yippie-ti-yi style that won him the 2001 Will Rogers Award for Yodeler of the Year. His national appearances have justly earned him a loyal following of fun loving fans.
Born in Hollywood, California, Rick Crowder spent much of his childhood on a family cattle ranch in the Sierra foothills. But as he explains, “my true calling as a cowboy was not on the range but rather, on the stage.” A childhood cut-up, he developed his comic character, honed his musical and yodeling skills and garnered the nick name “Slim” while performing in several traveling western bands in the 1970’s and 80’s. Sourdough Slim emerged in 1988 when he came up with the idea to meld his experiences into a solo act based on a comical accordion playing yodeling cowhand. His seasoned gift for connecting with audiences from Los Angeles’ Autry Museum to The Kennedy Center is a true testament to the irrepressible talent and dedication of this unique entertainer.
Our favorite porch music, a Winnemucca tradition, and the best purveyor of cowboy music in America today. TICKETS ARE ON SALE NOW!
Don Edwards
In what has become a tradition, Don Edwards will be at the Martin Hotel at 7:00 PM on Monday, January 26, for a performance before he moves on to Elko to join in the 25th Annual Cowboy Poetry Gathering. Folks at the Western Folklife Center in Elko told me yesterday they still have tickets to this great event and if you need one, rooms are still available at many motels in Elko.
Don represents the best of what Great Basin Arts and Entertainement is all about. He is a truly great singer, guitar player, folklorist, storyteller, engaging entertainer, and one of the finest gentlemen we have ever met.
This Grammy nominated singer-guitarist continues to build a legacy that enriches our vision of the American West. In tales of the day-to-day lives and emotions of those who have lived it, his ballads paint a sweeping landscape of both mind and heart, keeping alive the sights, sounds and feelings of this most American contribution to culture and art. The quality of this cowboy balladeer’s music stems from the fact that he is so much more than a singer. Bobby Weaver of the National Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City, summed up Edwards’ importance as “… the best purveyor of cowboy music in America today.” Continue reading “Don Edwards – Songs of the American West 7:00 PM Monday, January 26″
Music at the Martin
Karen Savoca and Pete Heitzman
Thursday, November 6, 2008
Karen Savoca Pete Heitzman
This was it for me. Back around 1996 I’d been hearing about these little concerts from some of my friends, maybe it was Ed Kretchsmer, I’m not sure. But I thought I’d give it a try, so I went to see Karen Savoca with Pete Heitzman. I had never heard of them, and had no idea what I was about to experience, but when they launched into an long extended version ofNo Where to Go, , with Karen slapping that big conga drum and Pete delicately wrapping and interlacing his guitar licks around her voice, I was hooked for good. The groove they created had me transfixed, transformed, pinned down, stretched out, and mesmerized. I was in.
Their touring schedule brought them around a couple more times, in 1998 and again in 1999, but it has been a very long stretch since we’ve seen them. About three years ago, I sent them an email, and kept sending them emails, urging them to come back to Winnemucca and The Martin, if their travels ever brought them this way. Now it’s finally going to happen. They are taking a flight from New York, out to Salt Lake City, to play a festival in Moab, Utah, and have agreed to take a little side trip to Winnemucca to see us again.
We’re going to need a big, enthuastic crowd, so please get out there and get a ticket. Tickets are $15, and they are ON SALE NOW!
Bio –
Karen and Pete first met on a stage and each immediately recognized the other as the ideal musical partner. Years of leading their all-original, dance-driven group imbued this duo with the power to sound like a full band, whether it’s pulsing funk or haunting ballad. Electrifying, unique, and always uplifting, these improvisational performers possess “the fearlessness of a high wire act working without a net.”
Karen Savoca puts her heart into a song the way a great actor throws herself into a role. Her supple, soulful alto is “both sex and spirit, growling and whispering the listener into submission”. Savoca is a gifted songwriter, drawing you into her world with humor and compassion, telling her stories with such grace and ease, you feel as though you’ve been invited to her table for supper. Savoca composes and records on a variety of instruments, but opts for the primal combination of voice and drum in live performance, and the groove is deep and satisfying.
Pete Heitzman’s “inspired and transcendent guitar work is central to their signature sound.” He’ll mimic a cello, a pedal steel, a rutting elk, and some things only imagined. With this broad pallet of tones and textures he paints the ideal landscapes for Savoca’s engaging songs. An innovative and sensitive accompanist, Heitzman is so full of surprises that he has been called “a human aurora borealis”. An 1890’s church in the hills of upstate New York serves as home, recording studio and headquarters for their own Alcove Records.
Notable appearances include The Today Show, A Prairie Home Companion, Mountain Stage, Big Top Chautauqua, The Vancouver, Edmonton & Winnipeg Folk Festivals. They have recorded and produced other artists, their music has been heard in movies and documentaries, and they have scored two feature length films.
“We didn’t have electricity and that meant we didn’t have T.V. We had darn poor radio too.
So that meant we did the strangest things at night … we talked to each other!”
– WADDIE MITCHELL, Cowboy Poet
$15 Tickets are On Sale Now !
“I can’t ever remember ‘finding’ cowboy poetry, “ Waddie Mitchell says of the entertaining and enduring art of storytelling. “It was always there. The cowboys sure never called it poetry. I know I wouldn’t have liked it if they would have. Seems like an oxymoron, don’t it!?”
From his earliest days on the remote Nevada ranches where his father worked, Waddie was immersed in the cowboy way of entertaining, the art of spinnin’ tales in rhyme and meter that came to be called cowboy poetry, a Western tradition that is as rich as the lifestyle that gave birth to it. Within his stories, told in a voice that is timeless and familiar, are the common bonds we all share, moments both grand and commonplace, the humorous and the tragic, the life and death struggles and triumphs that we each recognize. And yet, Waddie presents his material with personal insights and the lessons learned during his life spent as a buckaroo.
“All the time I was growing up we had these old cowboys around,” he says. “When you live in close proximity like that with the same folks month after month, one of your duties is to entertain each other, and I suppose that’s where the whole tradition of cowboy poetry started. You find that if you have a rhyme and a meter to start that story, people will listen to it over and over again,” Waddie states in his down-to-earth description of its beginnings.
“When my imagination first got let out of the gate, it was from an old-time cowboy, with a story set to rhyme,” he says in his second recording from Warner Western, Lone Driftin’ Rider. By the age of 10, he was reciting poetry himself; at 16, he quit school to follow his heart and went to making his living as a cowboy.
“I’d never done anything else, never made money without horses or cows until I started telling cowboy poetry.” The father of five children, (“They’re all girls, except four of them!”) his goal is to one day buy his own ranch. “I’m hoping,” Waddie says, “for the opportunity to go broke on a ranch by myself instead of helping somebody else do it!”
There came a time though, which he relates in his poem Where To Go, when he had to choose between being a full-time cowboy (he managed a 36,000 acre ranch in Lee-Jiggs, Nevada) and the art form that he loved so much. In 1984, he helped organize the internationally recognized Elko Cowboy Poetry Gathering and gave his first public performance. Although Waddie didn’t think anyone would be interested, (he thought it would be a pretty good party for the weekend) the first Cowboy Poetry Gathering was set for a cold, snowy weekend in January. This was one of the only times Waddie and his fellow cowboys were free from ranch duties. More than 2,000 people showed up, and Waddie was off and running.
Since then he has performed internationally for audiences from Los Angeles to New York, Zurich to Melbourne, and all points in between. With television appearances ranging from The Tonight Show (his neighbor took the first phoned invitation, drove 40 miles to deliver the message to the remotely based Waddie and returned with a “No Thanks” because it was calving time and he’d never heard of Johnny Carson), Larry King Live, Good Morning America, TNN, The History Channel, PBS, and BBC, Waddie has also been featured in People, Life, New York Times, USA Today, Fortune, National Geographic, Wall Street Journal and the Official Program for Super Bowl XXX, along with numerous other appearances, performances, articles and books. In 1994, Waddie founded the Working Ranch Cowboy Association with a mission of creating scholarships and crisis funds for working cowboys and their families. The well-recognized and highly respected WRCA now sanctions 22 regional rodeos throughout the West with the sold-out world championships held each November in Amarillo, TX.
His series of recordings for Warner Bros. Records and more recently for the Western Jubilee Recording Company have received critical acclaim. Waddie’s Western Jubilee Recordings are: Waddie Mitchell Live featuring Don Edwards as well as world class instrumentalists Rich O’Brien and Norman Blake and recorded live at the Western Jubilee Warehouse in Colorado Springs. A glowing review of Waddie Mitchell Live appeared in People, which concludes with “Bottom Line: Horse sense and humor from America’s Best Known Cowboy Poet.” This was followed by Prairie Portrait which features Waddie Mitchell, Don Edwards and the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra. In April, 2001, the Oklahoma City based Cowboy Hall of Fame / National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum presented Waddie with the coveted Wrangler Award for his participation in the Outstanding Traditional Western Album of the year.
The 2002 Cultural Olympiad commissioned Waddie Mitchell to write a commemorative poem. His offering, That No Quit Attitude, gained importance as the Salt Lake 2002 Olympic Winter Games grew nearer. No Quit appeared in the Welcome To Salt Lake film, in schools and libraries, on Delta Airlines, the Olympic web site, at the Olympic Arts Festival, on Western Jubilee’s CD single and many publications, including the Official Souvenir Program of the 2002 Winter Games. Since, That No Quit Attitude, also titles Waddie’s newest Western Jubilee release that contains fourteen new original poems and thirteen original ‘Waddie-isms’. 2003 found him on stage at Carnegie Hall and producing Elko – A Cowboy’s Gathering. This Western Jubilee double disc features 40 Artists and salutes the gathering he co-founded 20 years prior. Along with a busy 2005 touring schedule, he was featured on TV, radio, print and personal appearances as the Review Journal newspaper’s official spokesperson for the 100 Year Celebration of Las Vegas, NV.
