Bluesman Lonesome Jim Lawrance
With a 50-year-plus history as a musician and still going strong, Lonesome Jim Lawrance isn't resting on his laurels. He’s got a new CD out now and numerous videos on YouTube. Not only can you preview his music and performance style online, you can also check out his 1977 Ford Ranchero.
Lawrance started performing at the age of 12 and says his first “big money” gig was at the tender age of 14. He started playing with bands when he was 16 and joined the American Federation of Musicians at 19. He’s also squeezed in two university degrees and a career teaching high school English while raising a family.
Having retired from his day job in 2010, he is now concentrating on his music, both as a composer and singer of folk, rock and blues.
Lawrance started performing at the age of 12 and says his first “big money” gig was at the tender age of 14. He started playing with bands when he was 16 and joined the American Federation of Musicians at 19. He’s also squeezed in two university degrees and a career teaching high school English while raising a family.
Having retired from his day job in 2010, he is now concentrating on his music, both as a composer and singer of folk, rock and blues.
When I saw you perform last May, you played several different kinds of guitar as well as a sweet harmonica. Who taught you to play that?
My mother was a classical pianist and my father was a trumpeter but it was my grandfather who taught me the harmonica. I was all of four years old. He actually wrote that song “Put On Your Old Grey Bonnet.” And every night, for 15 minutes back then, we’d listen to the Don Messer Show on the radio together. He’d play the bones and spoons along with them.
 |
A 1965 promotional photo for The Imperials showing,
clockwise from top, Tony George, Lou Walsh, Teddy
Bryant and Jim Lawrence with his double-neck guitar. |
These days, I’m basically a bluesman in the tradition of Sonny Terry but I bill myself as “country blues” or “folk blues”. Then I have my harp stuff [harmonica] all based on music by James Cotton, Paul Butterfield, Little Walter, Sonny Boy Williamson.
What kind of music do you admire most?
At one time, I thought about making a foray into the world of jazz. They say that if you can play 12-bar blues, you can play jazz. I did “sit in” sometimes but I didn't think I had enough experience to do more than that even though jazz is my preferred listening.
You perform solo these days but you've also played with some quite large and notable groups.
Mostly I was with so-called “power trios” meaning drums, guitars and bass. But I got my introduction to rhythm and blues through Tony George who had a music store in Fredericton and fronted a four-man group called The Imperials. Fredericton was much more of a music town in the 1960s.
Speaking of the 60s, where were you for the Summer of Love?
1967. I was in Montreal, at Sir George Williams University, and playing in a psychedelic band called The Magic Tangerine Toilet. We actually had a toilet on stage, it was connected to a bank of amps and… well, you don’t want to know. But I did learn a lot about music in Montreal.
For me, music is a pursuit not a career.
 |
Before becoming “Lonesome”, Lawrance had an art background and was the first director of the McCain Art Gallery in Florenceville. He says that Chuck Berry, at centre here in one of Lawrance’s own collages, was a strong early influence on his music.
|