Events

Big Hank Lionhart has been singing the blues since the mid-1960s, when he started out in Edmonton bars as a teenager. What followed: Uncle Wiggly’s Hot Shoes Blues Band, signed to RCA, opening for Muddy Waters, James Cotton and Joe Cocker; the Smokin’ Hot Toasters, on Commodore Ballroom bills with Koko Taylor and the Neville Brothers; nine records, among them Still Burnin It Up (Apple / Spotify); a place in the Victoria Music Hall of Fame; and two trips to Memphis representing British Columbia at the International Blues Challenge. Six decades in, the voice has only got bigger.

The Christmas Blues Show is his own invention, on the road for more than a decade now and one of the very few holiday shows that is a real blues show. No sleigh bells, no syrup. This is the season as Etta James, Louis Jordan, Big Joe Turner, Fats Domino and B.B. King would have played it: jump blues, slow burners and R&B shuffles, a band that swings, and a frontman who has been selling these songs since before most of the room was born.

Penticton already knows him. He has played the old Dream Cafe, most recently packing it out with The Blue Hearts, the two-man guitar-and-voice project he keeps with Mark Comerford. This is the first time he brings the whole thing into the new room.

And the room is the reason to come. A voice that size, at this range, with nothing in the way.

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