INTERNATIONALLY ACCLAIMED BLUES ARTIST GUY DAVIS TO PERFORM AT THE FLAGPOLE RADIO CAFÉ
The Newtown Cultural Arts Commission is pleased to announce that acclaimed blues musician, composer, and actor, Guy Davis will be the guest artist for the May 21st edition of The Flagpole Radio Café. Tickets are now on sale at www.flagpoleproductions.org . The show begins at 7pm at the Edmond Town Hall in Newtown, CT. Ticket prices are $18 for adults, $15 for students and senior citizens. If further information is needed, please contact us at info@flagpoleproductions.org .
Producer Martin Blanco remarked, “Since we began the show we’ve wanted to have an authentic blues artist. We’re so fortunate to have someone as gifted and celebrated as Guy Davis appear on the program. I had the pleasure of meeting his parents when I was in graduate school where they were giving a lecture. They were extremely engaging and obviously very talented actors and writers. I look forward to meeting their son now and can’t wait to hear how he invigorates Newtown with his passionate and arresting interpretation of the blues. He’ll have great music and great stories for us.”
Whether Guy Davis is appearing on Late Night With Conan O’Brien, or nationally syndicated radio programs such as Garrison Keillor’s, A Prairie Home Companion, Mountain Stage or David Dye’s, World Café, in front of 15,000 people on the Main Stage of a major festival, or teaching an intimate gathering of students at a Music Camp, Guy feels the instinctive desire to give each listener his “all.” His “all” is the Blues.
Guy can tell you stories of his great-grandparents and is grandparents, they’re days as track linemen, and of their interactions with the infamous KKK. He can also tell you that as a child raised in middle-class New York suburbs; the only cotton he’s picked is his underwear up off the floor.
He's a musician, composer, actor, director, and writer. But most importantly, Guy Davis is a bluesman. The blues permeates every corner of Davis' creativity. Throughout his career, he has dedicated himself to reviving the traditions of acoustic blues and bringing them to as many ears as possible through the material of the great blues masters, African American stories, and his own original songs, stories and performance pieces.
Davis' writing projects have also included a variety of theatre pieces and plays. Mudsurfing, a collection of three short stories, received the 1991 Brio Award from the Bronx Council of the Arts. The Trial, (later renamed, The Trial: Judgement of the People), an anti-drug abuse, one-act play that toured throughout the New York City shelter system, was produced Off-Broadway in 1990, at the McGinn Cazale Theater. Davis also arranged, performed and co-wrote the music for an Emmy award winning film, To Be a Man. In the fall of 1995, his music was used in the national PBS series The American Promise.
Davis also performed in a theater piece with his parents, actors/writers Ruby Dee and the late Ossie Davis, entitled Two Hah Hahs and a Homeboy, staged at the Crossroads Theatre in New Brunswick, NJ in the spring of 1995. The show combined material written by Davis and his parents, with music, African American Folklore and history, as well as performance pieces by Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes. Of Davis' performance, one reviewer observed that his style and writing "sounds so deeply drenched in lost black traditions that you feel that they must predate him. But no, they don't. He created them."
Bluesman Guy has contributed songs on a host of tribute and compilation albums, including collections on bluesmen Charley Patton and Robert Johnson, for Putumayo Records collections including, From Mali to Memphis and the children’s album called, Sing Along With Putumayo, for tradition-based rockers like the Grateful Dead, songwriters like Nick Lowe, and for Bob Dylan’s 60th birthday CD called, A Nod to Bob, even on a Windham Hill collection of Choral Music, and alongside performers like Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne, and Bruce Springsteen for a collection of songs written by his friend, legendary folksinger, ‘Uncle’ Pete Seeger, called, Where Have All the Flowers Gone.
However, the proudest recording project he’s been involved with is the one produced by his friend Larry Long, called I Will Be Your Friend: Songs and Activities for Young Peacemakers, in which Guy contributes the title track. It’s a CD collection of enriching songs combined together with a teacher’s aide kit to help teach diversity and understanding. It is all part of the national “Teaching Tolerance” (www.tolerance.org) campaign and continues to be distributed by the Southern Poverty Law Center, and sent to every public school in the country to help combat hatred. Guy also wrote a couple songs and recorded with Dr. John for Whoopi Goldberg’s Littleburg series, and appeared and sang in Jack’s Big Show, both for the Nickelodeon network and Nick, Jr.
Guy has also done residency programs for the Lincoln Center Institute, the Kennedy Center, the State Theatre in New Jersey, and works with “Young Audiences of NJ,” doing classroom workshops and assembly programs all across the country and in Canada for Elementary, High School, and College students. Most recently Guy had the honor of appearing in the PBS special on Jazz and Blues artist, the late Howard Armstrong.
For those not acquainted with The Flagpole Radio Café, it is an engaging variety show created by Jim Allyn, Martin Blanco and Barbara Gaines in conjunction with the Newtown Cultural Arts Commission. It features music by Jim Allyn and the Radio Café Orchestra, a dynamic ensemble created for the show, and radio style comedy sketches by the hyperbolically named Flagpole Shakespeare Repertory Theatre. The Flagpole Radio Café is hosted by musician and radio personality Chris Teskey. Each show features a musical guest artist such as Tom Chapin, Peter Yarrow, Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, Christine Lavin, Roger Ball of The Average White Band, Vanesse Thomas and Yale’s internationally acclaimed male choir The Whiffenpoofs.
