Bonnie Dobson & Friends

Bonnie Dobson and Friends
Ben Crosland on bass and Ben Phillipson on guitar

The Harwich Festival is proud to announce a special performance by Canadian folk singer Bonnie Dobson.

Her extraordinary stellar career across seven decades shows no signs of slowing down.
As a 15-year-old, her Uncle Paul smuggled her into a jazz club in Toronto and she heard Jimmy Rushing for the first time. That is where her love of the blues began. She started out performing traditional French-Canadian, American, English and some Slavic folk songs as a teen at school. In 1960, she babysat for folk concert agent Marty Bochner who introduced her to Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee’s agent Paul Endicott. That led her to open for Sonny and Brownie and before she knew it, there was a recording contract with Prestige leading to a series of solo albums and a full diary of gigs across the North American continent.

The fear of nuclear war was ever present in the early 60s and a viewing by Bonnie in 1961 of Stanley Kramer’s apocalyptic film On The Beach led her to write her classic anti war anthem Morning Dew, her very first composition and a song that has been recorded by countless artists worldwide including The Grateful Dead, The Allman Brothers, Jeff Beck, Lulu, Robert Plant, Nazareth, The Move and Procol Harum. It is a modern standard that has great resonance in today’s world, 60 years after its creation.

Down the years, Bonnie has shared a stage with folk and blues legends including Reverend Gary Davis, John Lee Hooker, Buddy Guy, Junior Wells, Mississippi John Hurt and Big Joe Williams. She became friends with Bob Dylan. She was present at Greenwich Village venue Gerdes Folk City one night when two young men took to the stage to sing. They called themselves Tom and Jerry. Those two young men later changed their name to Simon and Garfunkel.

At the 1962 Philadelphia Folk Festival, she was described as “Canada’s gift to the United States”. In 1969, Bonnie left behind her extensive concert circuit and a successful radio series in Canada and relocated to London.

At the end of the 80s, she had a complete change of career and became an academic until 2007 when she was hunted down to make a one-off appearance at Jarvis Cocker’s Meltdown Festival in a show entitled Lost Ladies of Folk. That led to a renewal of her music career. In 2013, Bonnie performed Morning Dew at the Bert Jansch Memorial Concert at The Royal Festival Hall with Robert Plant, Danny Thompson and Bernard Butler. And in 2014, she recorded an album of her compositions old and new for Hornbeam Records, Walk Me Out in the Morning Dew, with stellar musicians including Ben Paley, Ben Phillipson and BJ Cole.

In 2018, she was inducted into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame, the award being presented by her old friend Gordon Lightfoot, some 57 years after her debut performance of Morning Dew at the inaugural Mariposa Folk Festival.
Recently, she recorded a number of her compositions with The Hanging Stars, a British band channelling cosmic Americana, the sounds of the Byrds and The Flying Burrito Brothers. The resultant album, Dreams, is due for release on July 11. A series of concert dates in the UK and Sweden will follow.

At the Harwich Arts Centre, Bonnie Dobson will be accompanied by her old friends, jazz bassist Ben Crosland and folk guitarist Ben Phillipson. Ben Crosland is no stranger to the Harwich Festival, having performed his arrangements of Ray Davies songs with his stellar quintet and at the inaugural Jazz and Blues Day with his Threeway Trio last year. Ben Phillipson is the guitarist with pyschedelic folk rock six-piece The Eighteenth Day of May, who channel the likes of Fairport Convention, The Incredible String Band and Steeleye Span, with flashes of The Byrds, Fotheringay and even The Velvet Underground.