*IMPORTANT NOTE*
Price will increase $5 after Dec 26. Get your tickets today!
Doors open: 5pm
Water Cat: 6pm
Charlie Parr: 7pm
They don't make them like Parr anymore... (No Depression Magazine)
Join us for a concert with the inimitable country blues/folk legend Charlie Parr, and discover why critics call him "a Minnesota treasure", with an opening set by Water Cat.
Doors open at 5pm.
• VIP tickets are limited. VIP ticket holders receive reserved 1st, 2nd, & 3rd row seating (first come, first served).
In the music of Charlie Parr, there is a sincere conviction and earnest drive to create. The Minnesota-born guitarist, songwriter, and interpreter of traditional music has released 19 albums over two decades and has been known to perform up to 275 shows a year. Parr is a folk troubadour in the truest sense: taking to the road between shows, writing and rewriting songs as he plays, fueled by a belief that music is eternal and cannot be claimed or adequately explained. The bluesman poet pulls closely from the sights and sounds around him, his lyrical craftsmanship built by his influences. The sounds from his working-class upbringing—including Folkways legends such as Lead Belly and Woody Guthrie—imbue Parr’s music with stylistic echoes of blues and folk icons of decades past. Parr sees himself merely as a continuer of a folk tradition: “I feel like I stand on a lot of big shoulders,” he said in an interview. “I hope that I’ve brought a little bit of myself to the music.”
With a discography simultaneously transcendental in nature and grounded in roots music, Charlie Parr is the humble master of the 21st century folk tradition. Parr started recording in Duluth in 2002, where he lives today. Life in the port town on Lake Superior has a way of bleeding into his work the same way his childhood in Austin, Minnesota does. Parr self-released his debut album, Criminals and Sinners, and did the same for his sophomore album 1922 (2002). With growing popularity abroad, Parr signed with Red House Records in 2015, where he recorded break-out albums Stumpjumper (2015) and Dog (2017). Parr’s music has an overwhelming sense of being present and mindful, and his sound is timeless.
“Parr continues to spin life’s small details into profound lyrical observations of acceptance and wonder….the further adventures of a guitar-picking great” — MOJO
"People often talk about the blues being timeless, and that rings true for Parr and the songs on this album. Given the current sad state of America, they’ll be just as compelling, and poignant, years from now as the day they were written.” — RELIX
“A voice that somehow sounds like it came into existence hundreds of years ago while sounding fresher than nearly anything around him in 2019. His tenure as a living folk legend is solidified with each and every track ” — No Depression
“Parr is an example of a performer who never allows his gifts to get in the way of the music. His guitar playing is virtuosic and yet never becomes a distraction from the power of the story he's weaving before our ears.” – Popmatters
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WATER CAT Henry and Emma met on two separate occasions on two different continents. Henry spotted Emma while hiking in the Simien Mountains of Ethiopia in November 2017 and was too shy to say hello. Three months later he spotted her again at a hostel in Jaipur, India (not recognizing her) and that time worked up the courage to introduce himself. Eventually over a cup of ginger tea on a rooftop watching an enormous red sun set over the immense Rajastani city of Jaipur, Henry realized that he had seen Emma back in Ethiopia when she was traveling in a different group. Since then they have been inseparable, and have spent the past two years playing their fun loving style of sweet and stompy world music in the south of France and in the Alps. With Emma’s beautiful and effortless singing in French, English, Spanish, and Italian, and Henry’s multi-instrumental one man music machine, they make quite a pair.
A mix of original, americana, folk, blues, and French/world music that can put one at ease, bring tears to the eye, or light a fire. A little bit Janis Joplin, a bit Edith Piaf, with a helping of The Devil Makes Three and many others, Water Cat can make either make your ears groove or your body move.
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Aitkin County Friends of the Arts is a small, non-profit organization. Your purchase directly sustains & supports the future of performing arts in Aitkin County so we can continue to provide great, high-quality concerts just like this one. Your purchase matters! Thank you!
This activity is made possible, in part, by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support Grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund.
This show is also made possible, in part, by The Legacy Agreement and the Arts and Recreation Committee (ARAC).