Dorval bluesman believes songs should have something to say

BY BARBARA LAVOIE Dorval’s Dale Boyle, one of Quebec’s most prolific award-winning young blues songwriters and performers, released his second and latest CD, Small Town van Gogh, earlier this year.

His first in 2004, In My Rearview Mirror: A Story from a Small Gaspé Town, featured The Wilbert Coffin Story, a song about the wrongly-accused miner who was hung in Montreal’s Bordeaux jail in 1956.

Boyle seeks a return to the blues tradition of storytelling through song. Every song is an original on the almost all-acoustic 10-track album, the only exception being Bruce Springsteen’s My Hometown, and that’s because of its “personal resonance.” “I believe blues songs should have something to say,” said Boyle, valuing not only message over technical delivery, but the importance of “talking about what we have before it’s gone away.”

Boyle wastes no notes or chords in his craft — his lyrics are hauntingly direct and to the point.

The album’s title track pays homage to an artist in Boyle’s working-class Gaspé hometown who turns his hands to art in the absence of physical labour.

Other overlooked small-town heroes on his list include: Stompin’ Tom Connors and First World War veteran William “Duke” Procter, the unnoticed bartender, the alcoholic lover and all that remains of our country’s many deserted towns and villages.

For more information visit www.dale

boyle.com.翿