 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
•Table of Contents •Subscribe here •Give a Gift •Customer Service •Classroom Use •Students click here |
From the July 2001 issue of
World Press Review (VOL.48, No.7). Black and Blue in Nova ScotiaLenny Stoute, The Globe and Mail (centrist), Toronto, Canada,April 18, 2001.
It happened that way earlier this year in a Toronto club where the burly guitarist/vocalist Carson Downey, along with brother Murray on drums and bassist Marlowe Smith, opened for Buddy Guy, at 64 perhaps the last of the great Chicago bluesmen. The Downey crew unleashed a seven-song set of sweat-drenched intensity and left the delirious audience primed for the expected coup de grâce from Guy. Guy, however, failed on the follow-up, much to the chagrin of the Downeys. “The job of an opening act is to warm the audience so the headliner has something to work with,” said Carson. “We handed Buddy Guy a pumped-up audience—and he just spent all night...talking about the great old blues guys....I don’t think that’s what people come to a live show for. But, hey, if he’s not interested in entertaining the audience, we sure are.” The members of the band are all in their late 30s. They’ve been in the music business for almost 20 years, but it has been only in the last two or three that they’ve broken through to a bigger, trans-Canada audience. Last year, they released their first recording, All the Way, for Toronto-based Loggerhead Records. They’re a rarity in Canada’s music scene: an all-black, all-Canadian band playing the blues from a part of the country better known for Celtic-style fiddling and indie rockers such as Sloan and Thrush Hermit. Their hometown of North Preston, population circa 3,000, about 6 miles northeast of Halifax, is one of the almost exclusively black townships scattered around Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. Like all these communities, North Preston can trace its origins back to the late 18th century when an estimated 6,000 blacks, both slaves and free, came to Atlantic Canada as part of the Loyalist diaspora of the American Revolution. Carson Downey has five brothers and four sisters, and they were all raised in a small house with an oil furnace, a wood stove, and kerosene lamps for illumination. His father, Leon, and mother, Maureen, held a number of jobs to keep the family together. North Preston, like the other black townships rimmed around Halifax, was a community poor in cash but rich in soul and solidarity. “We only had each other to feed off back then,” Maureen Downey once explained to an interviewer. “We had to stick together.” Music was one of the glues of the community. Maureen Downey sang in a gospel choir. She “bought me my first guitar when I was 11 or 12,” recalled Carson Downey, and found the money for a set of drums for his brother Murray. Carson Downey’s musical roots are in soul and rock, bassist Marlowe came from funk, and Murray was a drummer-of-all-trades. Carson’s life changed in the mid-1980s when he went to hear Joe Murphy, a legend among Maritime blues and roots-music aficionados. “It’s hard to put into words, but something just clicked. Then Joe says to me, ‘I know you play, come on up and play something.’...I managed to put together a few Johnny Winter songs, and it went over well. The next day he called and asked if I wanted to play in his band. I...knew instinctively why he wanted me: I brought a spark to his band. Maybe I wasn’t as seasoned as some, but I was burning with the fire of a man with a new love.” Carson Downey stayed almost four years with the Murphy ensemble. When he set about starting his own band, he leaned heavily on brother Murray to “come over to the blues side.” “Back when we were coming up,” recalls Murray, “blues wasn’t all that popular. It was all disco, funk, and R&B.” Then the wheel spinning started. The band couldn’t get much work in Halifax. Plainly put, the white-owned clubs in Halifax, as a rule, don’t book local black acts. As to why that is, the band members proffer various theses. “The bar owners don’t like it that black people don’t leave their paychecks in the bars,” offers Smith. “Black people don’t necessarily go to bars and get drunk. They go out for the music and to dance. There are some great black bands covering the same kind of music they play in the dance clubs. But you’ll never see them hired to play any Halifax dance clubs.” According to Carson Downey, only one club in Halifax, The Derby, is black-operated and books local and mid-level black acts. In 1998, Torontonian Andy McCain was attending the East Coast Music Awards in Halifax when he heard some fiery jamming coming from a room. Carson Downey was playing guitar with his teeth. Three weeks later, McCain signed the band to his label, Loggerhead Records. Now the band is writing material for a second album. In the meantime, they’re wrapping up a two-month tour of Canada, to be followed by dates in 12 cities in Germany in May. “It would be nice to make a lot of money, but it’s also very important to get some recognition for the whole blues scene on the East Coast. From Canada and from the U.S., equally,” observed Carson Downey. “I’ve been told there’s an impression in the States that you have to be black and American to play the blues. Well, I can’t wait to tour down there and blow that misconception away.” That chance may not be long in coming: The band recently auditioned for U.S. management in Nashville, to positive response. Yet it’s very much an uphill slog. Marketing types in Canada say there’s a reluctance in the United States to believe that the black Canadian experience is as “authentic” as that of black Americans. So why believe the Carson Downey Band can change that? “Well, if you believe the blues is an expression of the soul, ... we can do this because we’ve been entertaining people, soul to soul, for a long time now,” Carson Downey offered. “I don’t believe American audiences are so different that they won’t get that.”
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
