Four decades of entertaining crowds worldwide with the blues has not slowed down an award-winning Calgary musician.
Singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Tim Williams lives much of his life on the road performing at awards galas, blues festivals, house concerts and concert series.
“Most of my touring, especially the last few years in Canada, has been the three western provinces,” he said. “Most of my tour is solo and acoustic. I’m pretty good at explaining in a non-academic way the history and the growth of that music and the influences on it. It winds up being a show that translates well to folk clubs and community concert series and blues societies.”
During this year’s busy schedule, Williams penciled in a night of blues music with The Tim Williams Band for the Beneath the Arch Concert Series.
He will perform Feb. 11 at 7:30 p.m. in the Flare ‘n’ Derrick Community Hall in Turner Valley.
The show will be a mix of solo and band performances that spans from his early days to his most recent works.
“I’ve recorded such a wide variety of stuff over the years that it’s hard to touch on all of it,” he said. “We do a pretty engaging fun show.”
In late January, Williams was in Toronto for the Blues Summit, a conference for members of the blues community including presenters, artists and industry representatives.
Williams performed at the 20th annual Maple Blues Awards gala and was nominated for acoustic act of the year and best guitarist.
Three days after his performance in Turner Valley, Williams will head south to Mexico for a month of entertaining.
“I try to go to Mexico every year,” he said. “It graduated from going down on holidays to performing. I’ve got a couple of festivals and a couple of theatre gigs.”
The American-born bluesman often draws an audience of expats, but he’s developing a fan base among Mexican natives in a culture he describes as being rich with guitar lovers and guitar builders.
“Guitar has such a rich history in Mexico,” he said. “It’s that universal language of being a guitar player that has an appeal to the Mexican audience as well. What I play is so stylistically different from them. The blues guitar style is so uncommon to them that it tends to go down well with Mexican nationals as well.”
This spring, Williams will tour Ontario and in the summer months will keep busy performing at festivals like the Calgary International Blues Festival and Edmonton Folk Music Festival.
In the fall, Williams – the winner of the 2014 International Blues Challenge in the solo-duet category – will tour southern Manitoba with a number of house concerts through Home Routes, which brings musicians into people’s homes in remote communities across Canada.
Williams has dabbled in other genres of music over the years, but said he’s always been drawn to the blues.
The first vinyl he recorded in the late 1960s was a blues disk, although he’s made a couple of country-folk albums, complete with peddle steel guitars.
“From the time I was 15 on, mostly I was interested in the blues,” he said. “It just struck me – the power of the pre-war bluesmen. Just one man with a guitar and a voice was quite impressive. I always loved great flashy country guitar players.”
In his mid-teens, Williams’ family moved from Los Angeles to a small town in the Mojave dessert. That’s when he began delving into blues music.
“There wasn’t much else to do so it contributes greatly to your feelings of isolated teenage angst,” he said. “The blues talk a lot about loneliness and trouble – I think that was part of it. When you’re an artistically-minded kid it’s easy to develop a sense of not fitting in. Moving from LA to a place that was stuck in the ’50s made me a little more of an outsider. The blues is traditionally outsider music.”
Williams began making a name for himself as a blues musician and settled in Canada in 1970.
He then took a break from his music career and worked as a horse wrangler and ranch hand, mostly in British Columbia, for almost a decade.
In 2010, Williams wrote the album When I was a Cowboy, consisting of tunes that reflected on those ranching experiences.
“It’s traditional cowboy tunes I learned from family and friends and stuff that I wrote when that was the life I lived,” he said. “I had a couple of wrecks with horses that kept me from being able to sleep more than a few hours at a time over a period of several years. I would sit down and play the guitar and the thing that I always played to put my mind at ease and put me in a place where I could go back to sleep was the blues.”
Tickets to see The Tim Williams Band cost $25 for adults and $10 for children in advance, and $30 at the door if available.
For more information go to beneaththearch.ca
