Time: 8 p.m.
Cover: $10
Charlie Ewing was born in Cutbank, Montana in wind swept Glacier County just thirty miles south of the medicine line. His parents moved to the Porcupine Hills of Alberta, about 130 miles to the north when he was a long yearling and he has lived there pretty much the rest of his life, ranching and living the cowboy lifestyle that dominates his song writing.
His ancestral history though, predetermines this disregard for the international boundary. His grandmother of seven generations back was a full blood Ojibwa from the Great Lakes region who married an Irish trader and operated a trading post on Michilimacinac Island, near where lakes Superior, Huron and Michigan meet. Other Scots-Irish ancestors came to America before the revolution and never missing a chance to fight the British, fought in that war on the American side and later, were among the early settlers on the Ohio River when settlement opened up in the late 1700s. Throw in a mishmash of Swiss, French, English, and who knows what else and the family tree branches out along the 49th parallel from Maine to Michigan, Minnesota to Montana.
The songs that present themselves on the new album, Buffalo Horses, are the result of all this personal history. They are songs about cowboys, Indians and wide open spaces… the freedom of the open road and the desire to stay rooted… longing for the past and the hope of tomorrow.
Charlie’s musical life began while his Dad sang old cowboy and folk songs on his Martin 00-17 guitar, then listening to records from his parents and older sisters’ collections… artists like Pete Seeger, Burl Ives, Joan Baez, Ian and Sylvia, Peter, Paul and Mary, Gordon Lightfoot and later discovering Jimmy Rogers, Woody Guthrie and Hank Williams. Bluegrass and Old Time musicians like Earl Scruggs, Bill Monroe, Doc Watson, Norman Blake and Tony Rice fuelled the desire to learn to pick guitar, mandolin and banjo and song writers like Lightfoot, Tyson, Tim O’Brien and Bob Dylan to mention just a few, sparked an interest in trying to write his own songs.
