Blues icon to perform at Bermuda Folk Club

Blues and folk icon Alice Stuart is said to have paved the way for such female artists as Bonnie Raitt, Chrissie Hynde (The Pretenders) and Suzie Quatro.

Ms Stuart was once nominated for a Grammy Award and also a Handy — the blues industry equivalent of a Grammy.

Local folk musician Michael Cacy invited Ms Stuart to perform in Bermuda when he met her at a concert in Portland, Oregon where they were both playing. She will perform at the Spanish Point Boat Club on April 9.

During her stay here, Ms Stuart will play songs from throughout her career including her last album Freedom, recorded in 2007, and an album she is currently working on.

“I’m really looking forward to Bermuda,” she told the Bermuda Sun.

“I’ll play some new songs — I started working on an acoustic CD about a month ago and I hope to get something out within the next four to five months.

“There is a song everybody asks me about after the performance — it is called Only a Love Song Will Do. It was written by a friend of mine in California and I just changed a few of the words. It is very heartfelt and uplifting. I’ll be playing it in Bermuda.”

In the early 1960s, Ms Stuart had a weekly gig on the West Coast TVseries Hootenanny before taking to the stage of the Berkeley Folk Festival in 1964, ‘66 and ‘70. This led to tours with folk legends including Baez, Doc Watson, Mississippi John Hurt and Hopkins before she was hired by Frank Zapper’s band Mothers of Invention.

She was the only female ever to play with the band marking herself out as one of the foremothers of rock and roll.

Stuart was playing rock and roll Stratocaster well before the wave of brash young female rockers of the early ‘60s.

She wrote her own music and fronted her own band playing lead guitar on national and international circuits during the ‘70s.

Wanderlust

“I graduated from high school in 1960 and true, a lot of girls stayed home and married their high school boyfriends,” she recalled. “But I always had a wanderlust and couldn’t wait to get out of school and go and make some music. I picked up the guitar after I left home and that’s what I’ve done ever since.

“I played piano early on and drums in a band — I’ve always been involved in music and always felt like I needed to do that. Johnny Cash, Buddy Holly, Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry were all huge influences. My influences were all guys who were out there doing it. I didn’t have any women role models — not in what I was doing.”

Ms Stuart later toured the U.S. and Europe with Van Morrison, Commander Cody, Michael Bloomfield and John Prine. She appeared and recorded with Jerry Garcia, John Hammond, Elvin Bishop, Dave Mason, Sonny Terry and Tower of Power and many others.

Although originally considered a folk musician, what Ms Stuart was playing from her earliest days was more blues than folk.

Blues photographer and historian Dick Waterman once remarked: “There would be no Bonnie Raitt without Alice Stuart.”

As the one who discovered Raitt, Waterman should know.

After a career break to raise children, Ms Stuart resumed her recording career in 1996 and was solidly back with the release of Can’t Find No Heaven which won her the Grammy and Handy nominations. In 2003, her song, I Ruined Your Life, was chosen for the soundtrack of The Station Agent, a Sundance favourite released by Miramax.

She previewed her new works on Freedom to packed audiences at the 2007 International Folk Alliance Conference.