Doc MacLean
When:
9 November 2024 @ 7:00 PM
2024-11-09T19:00:00-05:00
2024-11-09T19:15:00-05:00
Where:
Old Church Theatre
940 Bonisteel Rd. Trenton
ON
940 Bonisteel Rd. Trenton
ON
Cost:
25.00
Doc is a weathered, wily, but infinitely likeable storyteller/performer. Writing from the dark side of the blues highway, Doc’s distinctive vocals and bare fingers National guitar plot an intense, emotional remapping of contemporary Delta blues and roots music.
Forty-five years ago Doc was playing Charlie Patton songs in Son House’s living room. From back porch to big porch. The storyteller. An emotional remapping of contemporary delta blues. At one time Blues Revue Magazine called him the “Prince of Darkness.” There’s redemption here beyond the simple, acoustic medium– and an appeal that reaches well beyond the Crossroads.
It’s a career built on hard travel and performance. Early roots in Mississippi. Chicago. Atlanta. Canada. Toronto. Months and years spent living in cars, sleeping on floors, couch surfing. Repeat appearances at some of America’s best folk and blues venues. A lifetime spent on the Blues Highway with some of its most significant artists.
Long ago MacLean established his annual, 100 plus show, National Steel Blues Tour to play all parts of North America. In the process, the Tour itself became legendary. Ice roads to the arctic. Crazy, burning highways through the desert wilds. Hard travel, wrecks, and tough North American weather. In recent years the Tour has reached Africa, where Doc now spends the majority of his time. “No venue too large, too small, too grand or too humble.” Even places lost in the folds of the map. The thing that has been carried is returned. People Magazine followed Doc’s 2017 Crossbones Tour through the South African Townships, calling him a “beautiful storyteller.”
Doc continues as a blues vagabond, travelling most of the year and writing from the dark side of the highway. A songster from the delta tradition, he explored and resided in the American rural south at a time when it was much less visited than it is today, and had mentors like Son House, Peg Leg Sam, and Sam Chatmon. Gifted by the grandchildren of slaves, MacLean now sings his own stories and tells his own songs in his own voice. His mostly resophonic, finger style slide guitar pays sonic homage to Patton, House, and Big Joe Williams, in a roots based, yet contemporary context.
