Joe Murphy and the Water Street Blues Band played the Saturday late night slot at Murphy's Community Centre. 11:30pm, Kwik Kopy Late Night. The festival bio promised they would have the crowd on its feet and dancing. That is what they do.
The Saturday afternoon institution
For more than twenty years by 2011, Joe Murphy and his band had been playing every Saturday afternoon at Your Father's Moustache in Halifax . It started in the late eighties, during what Murphy calls the Matinee Wars, when bars on Spring Garden Road competed for the weekend crowd. His band won. They have been there ever since .
The matinee is a dancing crowd. A core group of regulars who show up every week, know the songs, and move. Murphy has said the dancing is what makes it. The band feeds off it, and the room feeds off the band . By the time they got to Charlottetown, they had been doing this long enough that it was second nature.
The band and the resume
Murphy is the constant. Singer, guitarist, harmonica player, accordion player. He got his start sitting in with Dutch Mason in 1972 and played on Dutchie's last album . He has backed up Otis Rush, Johnnie Johnson, Pinetop Perkins, and Kenny "Blues Boss" Wayne. He played harp for three nights with John Lee Hooker. He spent a week playing with Sunnyland Slim . The resume is long and the names are heavy.
The band around him for the 2011 festival was a who's who of the Halifax blues scene. John Eyman on guitar, Greg "Fish" Fancy on bass, Barry Cooke on keyboards and vocals, Ian O'Donnel on drums. Players who had been around, who knew the repertoire, who could lock in without a lot of fuss.
That night
The late night shows at the festival were for the people who were not ready to go home. After the main stage wrapped, the crowd shifted to the smaller rooms. By 11:30pm on a Saturday, the week had been long and the audience was loose. A band like the Water Street Blues Band was exactly right for that moment. Horns, harmonica, a rhythm section that pushes. Music built for movement.
The festival bio noted that the band had been taking Halifax events to the next level for years. The late night crowd in Charlottetown got the same treatment. No warmup, no pretense. Just a working band that has been doing this longer than some of the audience has been alive.
Since then
Murphy and the band kept going. In 2015 they recorded a live album at Your Father's Moustache to mark twenty-five years of the Saturday matinee, with help from CBC . He has released five albums, two with the Water Street Blues Band and a couple of side projects . He still plays around the Maritimes. The matinee may have ended, but the band has not.
For the current festival, head to the schedule page or the main lineup page. This archive is kept for looking back.