Doc maclean

THE SMOKIN' STAGE @McNeills

Saturday August 10th at 5pm - FREE

Doc also plays support to Grainne Duffy at The Abbey Tavern on Friday August 9th at 7.30pm. This is a ticketed event.

 

Forty-five years ago Doc MacLean was playing Charlie Patton songs in Son House's living room. From back porch to big porch. The storyteller. An emotional remapping of contemporary delta blues. At one time Blues Revue Magazine called him the "Prince of Darkness." There's redemption here beyond the simple, acoustic medium– and an appeal that reaches well beyond the Crossroads.

Doc MacLean has performed and recorded with a who's who of first and second generation blues, roots and gospel artists such as Sam Chatmon, Peg Leg Sam, and Blind John Davis. Among many others, he supported Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Muddy Waters, Johnny Winter, and BB King. With Grammy winning producer Colin Linden and members of the Canned Heat and Mavis Staples bands he next went on to record the groundbreaking, "Narrow House" album.

Now best known as a songwriter and storyteller, MacLean has more recently recorded in Africa with contemporary and traditional players such as Albert Frost and Lungiswa Plaatjies. This real deal, old school troubadour still self drives to hundreds of shows every year— sometimes busking the places in between. Over his 49 year performing career, he's appeared at many of America's most significant folk, blues and roots music festivals. But North America is now seen more often in the rear view mirror…

Over the last few years MacLean has driven over 100 thousand km across South Africa, taking it for his own. Named as one of the top sets at the massive, 2017 OppiKoppi festival, he's now played most of the largest festivals, smallest juke joints, coolest theatres, and best regarded presentation stages in southern Africa as well. The thing that has been carried is again returned. "No venue too large, too small, too grand or too humble." Even places lost in the folds of the map.

Writing from the dark side of the road, Doc MacLean remains a songster from the delta tradition. A traveler. Gifted by the grandchildren of slaves, MacLean now sings his own stories and tells his own songs in his own voice. His mostly resophonic, finger style slide guitar pays sonic homage to Patton, House, and Big Joe Williams, while moving forward in a roots based, yet contemporary context. To MacLean, the Blues is not a genre: it is a condition of the human spirit, a healing music, a journey of the soul, a container of past, present, and future. JoJo Man surfs the space between the dreamlines and the songlines: not practised, not learned: but channeled and told in the moment. More: https://jojomanblues.blogspot.com/

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6uzlHUDzLI

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