Legendary roots artist Ray Bonneville to perform for Silver City School House Community Center
Ray Bonneville, a New Orleans-influenced guitarist/songwriter, will perform in Silver City on Sunday as part of a benefit for the Silver City School House.
The growing Comstock community of Silver City built a one room schoolhouse in 1867. Soon a south wing was added, making room for as many as 166 students. The building continued in use as a school for almost a century. In 1957 the town stopped using the building as a school. It was soon turned into a community center and housed the Silver City Volunteer Fire Department. Following construction of a new fire station in 1991, the building was renovated for exclusive use as a community center.
The schoolhouse was destroyed by fire in 2004, and in 2007 the Silver City Community Center was rebuilt in the same architectural style as the old schoolhouse, using many materials salvaged from the original structure.
Today, managed by the Silver City Historic Preservation Society, the Silver City School House is the center of community activity in town. It hosts town meetings, soup socials, holiday gatherings, a thriving kid’s summer camp, sock hops, art shows and now concerts.
Doors open at 4 p.m., with the show, 5 p.m. at 385 High St, Silver City, Nev. For reservations and information visit: https://www.facebook.com/events/608398115975901/ or email: SilverCityLive@gmail.com
Austin-via Montreal artist Bonneville is playing concerts in support of his latest Red House Records release, Easy Gone, out now on the Grammy-winning indie. Ray’s gritty, Delta-influenced sound didn’t happen overnight; he didn't write his first song until his early 40s, some 20 years after he started performing. But with a style that draws comparisons to JJ Cale and Daniel Lanois (or a French-Canadian Ton Waits), this blues-influenced, New Orleans-inspired “song and groove man,” as he’s been described, has found his rightful calling.
Born in Quebec, his family moved to Boston when he was 12. Not speaking English, he struggled with school and dropped out in his teens. He served a year in Vietnam as a Marine, struggled and overcame drug addiction, earned a pilot’s license in Colorado, then moved to Alaska, then Seattle, and Paris and New Orleans. But it took a close call while piloting a seaplane across the Canadian wilderness to make him decide it was time to get busy writing songs - gritty narratives inspired by a lifetime of hard-won knowledge set against his gritty, soulful guitar and blistering harmonica playing.
He’s since earned many accolades, including a Juno Award for his 1999 album, Gust of Wind. His post-Katrina ode, “I Am the Big Easy,” earned the International Folk Alliance’s 2009 Song of the Year Award, and in 2012, Bonneville won the solo/duet category in the Blues Foundation’s International Blues Challenge. He has guested on albums by Mary Gauthier, Gurf Morlix, Eliza Gilkyson, Ray Wylie Hubbard and other prominent artists, and shared songwriting credits with Tim O’Brien, Phil Roy and Morlix, among others. Slaid Cleaves placed Bonneville’s “Run Jolee Run” on his lauded 2009 album, Everything You Love Will Be Taken Away. He's been reviewed on NPR Fresh Air and appeared on eTown and NPR Mountain Stage as well as many regional radio shows.
Easy Gone takes listeners to some of the dark spaces and exotic places Bonneville has gone on his own travels and features his wonderfully greasy, percussive guitar playing and distinctive vocals. An Austin resident since 2006, Bonneville still puts the rhythms and soul of New Orleans into much of his music. His songs carry a groove and momentum that’s uniquely his and his narratives are inspired by the drifters, smoky clubs and odd jobs that were his life.
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