Kim Beggs will release her new album, Blue Bones, on July 20 as her label debut for Black Hen Music. Kim Beggs is already an acclaimed artist in her native Canada, where she represented her country at Canada Day celebrations in London's Trafalgar Square and was a recent nominee in CBC Radio's Songquest competition. One of Kim's previous CDs, Wanderer's Paean, earned her a Canadian Folk Music Award, Western Canadian Music Award and several other award nominations. Her other additional prior release was titled Streetcar Heart.
With a style that floats comfortably between folk and country, Beggs demonstrates a keen feeling for Appalachian music styles throughout Blue Bones, even trotting out an impressive yodeling technique on the appropriately titled "Can't Slow Down Yodel."
The rest of the album's 13 tracks flow like a clear mountain stream of vulnerability and toughness, exhibiting love, loss and hard-fought freedom, delivered with an effortless grace and breezy sensibility that has become her vocal trademark.
Producer and Black Hen Music label head Steve Dawson assembled a sympathetic cast of musicians to back Kim Beggs for these sessions, including John Raham (drums), Keith Lowe (bass) and Chris Gestrin (keyboard), adding his own masterful touches on electric, slide, National steel and Weissenborn guitars to the mix. Providing harmony vocals throughout are Laurie Lewis, Gurf Morlix, Natalie Edelson and Jeanne Tolmie.
Blue Bones features nine originals, as well as her beautiful interpretations of the traditional "I'm Thinking Tonight of My Blue Eyes" (sung in a high lonesome voice that recalls the great Kitty Wells, who had a 1952 hit with "It Wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels," based on the same melody), Bob Dylan's "I'll Be Your Baby Tonight," Patty Griffin's "Trapeze" and Jack Clement's "Just Someone I Used to Know."
Beggs' music is clearly informed by her background, having been born in Quebec and raised in the mining towns of Northern Ontario. She left her home in the winter of 1991 for the hardscrabble life in the Yukon, arriving with only fifty dollars in her pocket and a pawnshop guitar. She spent more than a decade swinging a hammer and working in the trades before she started performing away from the campfire and singing her own songs.
Kim Beggs will support the release of Blue Bones with tour dates both in Canada and the U.S. For more information visit www.blackhenmusic.com
