Shari Kane and Dave Steele w/ Rollie Tussing – December 14, 2024

Shari Kane and Dave Steele first met in the summer of 1991, crossing paths as performing blues musicians: Shari was the partner of harmonica legend, Madcat Ruth, (Madcat & Kane), while Dave was leading the electric blues band, Big Dave and the Ultrasonics. A happy marriage, thousands of miles of touring, and more than twenty-five years later, they are loving life on the road together.

Friends, neighbors, fellow musicians and fans have asked over the years, “When are you two going to start playing together?” The truth is, they’ve been playing together since their first date. In many ways their playing has developed side by side, listening to and learning from great acoustic blues guitarists from the past – Reverend Gary Davis, Robert Johnson, Blind Blake, Robert Lockwood Jr. to name just a few. Whether stomping out a blues on the front porch, deciphering a rag in the basement, or swinging on a lazy day in the back yard, they’ve been finding ways to put guitar parts together for years.

As an acoustic blues duo, Shari and Dave throw a four handed guitar party of original and time-honored blues, gospel, swing and ragtime. Steeped in Dave’s smoky vocals, percussive rhythm and innovative lead lines, Shari’s crisp picking style, rootsy leads, and stinging slidework, their music has been described as “street swing and stomp blues,” – like a testament to sounds once heard on the streets of Harlem, the juke joints of Mississippi, the Carolina hills or the jug bands of Memphis .

Award-winning finger-style guitarist Rollie Tussing performs timeless classic and country blues, dewy-eyed tunes of the 20s, as well as Godforsaken songs of the nineteenth century. His own compositions are influenced by those same lonesome, haunted, and abandoned melodies that we all forgot to remember.

He composes a lot of his own songs and has a knack for reworking an old obscure tune, finding beauty in the forgotten scratches, pops and grooves of his esoteric record collection. After winning the National Slide Guitar Competition in 2001 Rollie moved with his wife to Portland, Oregon. He spent the next decade touring, performing, writing songs and playing with some of the best regional and touring musicians the West Coast offered. In 2011 with their second child on the way, Rollie and his wife decided to relocate to the Midwest to be closer to family and to tap into the artistic resources in the nation’s midsection. There’s fingerstyle guitar, forgotten old music, and great old songs—a fabulous evening all around.