Ken Hamm and Linda McRae were in Lethbridge to blow blues and folk fans away, Nov. 27 at the Wolf’s Den. Especially Hamm who provided the almost full house with a crash course in blues history.
While we had a lot of great blues music this week, most of it based on fingerpicking, Hamm stood out above the crowd. The man is truly a master of the national Steel guitar and showed his chops, finger picking bass lines and melodies which made him sound like an orchestra of guitars rather than just one man during his brief set of fast paced finger-picking and Delta melodies.
He began with a couple Bo Diddley classics “Can’t Judge A Book,” and “ Who Do You Love,” then told a couple stories followed by an excellent version of “Bourgeois Blues. He played a couple gospel numbers, switched to a standard tuned acoustic and had me looking for the Devil over my shoulder during his exceptional and amazingly ominous version of Willie Dixon’s “Evil,” and an old Muddy Waters’ song “She Moves Me Man.”
Since moving to Forget , Saskatchewan, he has taught himself to play banjo and dobro, and pulled out the banjo for a couple numbers, which he played with the slide. I’ve never seen slide banjo before, so was duly impressed by his version of ”Rolling and Tumbling” on it, which was prefaced with a story of slaves bringing banjos over with them and having to make their own strings with gut.
Linda McRae joined him on stage on banjo, as Hamm switched to dobro for a couple numbers including a railroad song and another written about a general strike in Thunder Bay back in the ’20s and ’30s protesting the practice of bringing over foreign workers from Finland to work in logging camps, only to present them with a bill after for their food and supplies.
McRae added some vocal harmonies and banjo before the duo took a brief break, as McRae was to carry the second set, which I couldn’t stay for.
Murray Nelson, fiddler Ed Dietrich and Bruce Roome opened the show, though I just missed their set.
