Suzie Vinnick pulls it all together — again — with
Live At Bluesville
Peter Goddard, Special to the Toronto Star

Suzie Vinnick has this problem when it comes to getting it all together. Because she has got it all together. And that’s a situation rarely associated with being a preeminent singer of the blues, which she is.
Struggles? File that under having to getting up at 5 a.m. to catch a flight at Toronto Pearson International Airport for a well-paying gig halfway across the continent. Awful home life? Think again. Her partner James Dean — “yup, James Dean” she says — figures in most of her stories like the one about traveling to New Orleans to help in the post-Katrina rebuilding efforts and scoping out new musical
material.

Messed-up career path? Sorry. The much-awarded Saskatchewan-born singer/songwriter has the proclivity of having things fall into place, a knack amply demonstrated by her recently released CD,
Live At Bluesville, which she debuts Thursday night at Hugh’s Room .
This all-acoustic collection — which includes her “How’d You Know I Missed You,” a lovely tune suggestive of early jazz co-written with Rick Fines — began life as performances for a SiriusXM Radio show recorded live in Washington, D.C. by Bill Wax, program director for B.B. King’s satellite radio show. Vinnick had met Wax at a Toronto
blues event last year where she gave him a copy of Me ‘n’ Mabel, her first solo acoustic album. (“Mabel” is Vinnick’s guitar the way “Lucille” is King’s guitar). “I wasn’t completely clear what Bill was going to do on the show, if he was just going to interview me,” says Vinnick on the phone as we both sit tapping away on our respective computers. “I hadn’t been doing a lot of writing but I had been doing a lot of the songs on the recording during recent shows. The goal was not to put an album out but to do a radio show.”

Now isn’t this the vintage Vinnick knack all over again, in which a radio show becomes album becomes gig? Well, yes and no. What’s not in
evidence is the heavy slogging she’s done over her 40-some years; the recording sessions for others she’s worked on, the festivals she’s
appeared in. Early on in life the self-taught Vinnick learned to distinguish career-making from music-making, understanding Billie Holiday’s warning that you can’t really sing the blues if you have them.

“I’d always gravitated toward music,” she says, “but I never remember speaking out loud about it or even thinking I was going to be a musician. By 13 I was playing saxophone and had started playing bass in the high school jazz band. But I was in my early 30s when I didn’t have to take other jobs to supplement my income from music.”
Along the way she’s appeared with Betty and the Bobs, the Marigolds, toured with the theatrical iteration of Stuart McLean’s Vinyl Café and
performed overseas for the Canadian Armed Forces. Breaks in this performance schedule are likely filled in with workshops and blues tutorials she gives for emerging music professionals where she is likely to screen vintage music video clips such as Big Mama Thornton singing “Hound Dog” before Elvis Presley collared it for his own.
Vinnick’s range of professional activity is more than matched by the vocal range found on Live At Bluesville where she teases out meaning from lyrics using a repertoire of a half dozen or so voices. On Willie Dixon’s “You’ll Be Mine” her vampy vocal — “you’re so sweet” — morphs effortlessly into a full Joni Mitchell keening as the melody’s notes range higher. A little later a newfound gut-level urgency — “to the day that I die,” she’s singing — becomes deceptively cosy and devilishly cutesy as she insists, “you’ll be mine” in a way that makes you want make sure your wallet is where you left it.

No wonder she’s always on call to do commercials, with Tim Hortons already part of her portfolio. Vinnick turns singing into a theatre of attitude. “Sometimes in between the shows I do and being on the road, I have to tune into myself and think, ‘where do we want to go next?’” she says. “I would like to do a full big band blues recording. I also want to do something that reflects my Ukrainian roots. For me blues is only one part of the musical pie. I’ve always considered myself a roots musician.”

Peter Goddard is a freelance writer. He can be reached at peter_g1@sympatico.ca

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