American Strings: An Evening with Guy Davis
Date February 17, 2023 7:30pm Pricing $25American Strings: An Evening with Guy Davis.
Hosted by Bob Santelli, rock historian and Oregon State University’s director of popular music and performing arts, the American Strings series brings musicians from around the country for an in-depth look at the role stringed instruments play in American music. Each event includes a conversation and live performance from the invited artists.
Santelli will sit down with two-time, back-to-back Grammy nominee for Best Traditional Blues, a musician, actor, author, and songwriter, Guy Davis and talk about his career, music, and creative process. The interview will be followed by a live performance.
Run time: 90 min. No intermission.
Guy uses a blend of Roots, Blues, Folk, Rock, Rap, Spoken Word, and World Music to comment on, and address the frustrations of social injustice, touching on historical events, and common life struggles. His background in theater is pronounced through the lyrical storytelling of songs “God’s Gonna Make Things Over” about the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, “Welcome to My World”, and “Got Your Letter In My Pocket”. His storytelling is sometimes painful, deep, and real, an earthy contrast to modern-day commercial music, meant to create thought, underlined by gentle tones from his guitar or banjo fingerpicking.
Guy won “Keeping The Blues Alive” Award, and was nominated by The Blues Foundation for Best Acoustic Album of the Year, Best Acoustic Artist of the Year, and Best Instrumentalist. In fact, he’s been nominated nearly two dozen times by the Blues Foundation.
Among hundreds of newspaper appearances, he’s also been featured in articles or reviews by New York Times, Village Voice, Boston Globe, Pulse Magazine, Blues Magazine, Acoustic Guitar, Dirty Linen, Songlines, Blues Blast Magazine, Living Blues, Down At the Crossroads, The San Francisco Chronicle, Association For Independent Music (formerly NAIRD), Playboy Magazine, National Public Radio (NPR), “Folk Alley”, and Sirius.
When asked about his experience as a performer, Guy has replied, “There is no tale so tall that I cannot tell it, nor song so sweet that I cannot sing it.”