Sunday Morning Notes from the Redwood
Blues Revival - Angelique Francis and the Blackburns
There’s a thrum in the floorboards of this old theatre. Some mornings, when the sun filters soft and generous through the upper windows, the Redwood sounds like it’s humming a tune of its own—a low, blue note, rising from the ghosts of tap shoes and tube amps. It’s on mornings like this that I feel most like a caretaker of something sacred.
Photography and video Bill King
Today, the note belongs to two blazing fires—the Blackburn Brothers and Angelique Francis with her sisters. Canada’s black blues revival isn’t a gimmick. It’s a reckoning—a rising. The Blackburns—Duane, Brooke, Cory, and Robert—are blood-bound to this music, raised in the wake of Bobby Dean Blackburn, who laid the Toronto bar scene flat in the '60s and ‘70s with nothing more than a Hammond and a soul set to boil. They carry his torch like it’s fused to their fingers.
Then there’s Angelique—a thunderbolt wrapped in velvet and bass grooves, leading her sisters through gospel, swing, funk, and the gutbucket blues like they’ve always lived in the pocket. Watching them is like peeking into the past and future all at once—Big Mama Thornton by way of Beyoncé’s stage swagger, but rooted in family, fire, and chops homed in hard places.
And here’s the thing—their rise isn’t greased by industry hands or shortcut gimmicks. They’re taking the long road. Vans and trailers, club gigs and festival grass, merch tables and midnight load-ins. They know the blues isn’t just something you play—it’s something you live. And right now, they’re living it out loud across the Canadian backroads.
We forget, sometimes, how many American blues giants found a softer landing on this northern soil. Salome Bey, our Empress of the Blues. Harrison Kennedy, with that haunted, honeyed voice. Mel Brown, the Mississippi string bender who turned Kitchener into a six-string sanctuary. And Jackie Washington—the original griot of Hamilton, a man who could thread Louis Armstrong, Blind Lemon Jefferson, and his childhood in a single sentence.
That’s the soil these new voices are growing from. And this morning, I’m giving thanks. For the rhythm. For the revival. For this red-brick refuge on Gerrard Street East, where music lives, breathes, and tells the truth.
The Redwood is wide open. Step inside. The blues are back—and they’re dressed in family.
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