Old hotel bars were like university lecture halls for Jolene Higgins when she was younger. That’s where she soaked up as much blues music as she could during Regina’s famous “six-nighters”— short residencies where artists like Big Dave McLean would set up shop and play every night for six days.
Meeting new people, playing with new people, playing new stuff is always a journey,”
“I was doing a theatre show in Regina,” Higgins says of the time. “When the show closed, I didn’t have anything else going on, so I stayed in Regina and got an apartment, worked at a café part-time to pay for it and saw tons of live music.”
You can hear the influence of that experience when Higgins brings her brand of blues to the Yukon Arts Centre on Nov. 12. She’ll perform for YAC’s Yukoner Appreciation Night under her stage name, Little Miss Higgins, along with her longtime collaborator, Daniel Péloquin-Hopfner.
It will be her first time back in the territory since she visited more than a decade ago to perform as part of the Western Canadian Music Awards.
Since releasing her first EP in 2002, Higgins has been nominated for and/or won awards in categories ranging from album design, roots and traditional album, and solo artist of the year at the Juno Awards, Canadian Folk Music Awards and the Western Canadian Music Awards.
She says audiences tell her that her sound is refreshing even while it’s influenced by older music. In addition to her blues education, Higgins grew up playing classical piano. Her parents also listened to a lot of 1980s country when she was a kid. In her teens and early 20s, Higgins, who was born in Alberta, but raised in Kansas before moving back to western Canada, saw live music all over Vancouver, Saskatoon and Edmonton—everything from local musicians to acts that came up from Chicago and New Orleans.
All of that has a place in her sound now, though Higgins says she’s always noticing new influences. It varies—nothing ever works out the same way twice when she’s writing.
“Meeting new people, playing with new people, playing new stuff is always a journey,” she says.
The same could be said of the last few years. Higgins has a nine-year-old and says the experience of motherhood has also changed her approach to making music. She used to sit and write every day, then figure out later where she might use what she’d worked on. These days, she says stories, ideas and bits of melody will come to her head as she’s going through her day and she has to kind of make a mental bookmark to come back to it when she has time.
It’s a strategy that seems to be working. In 2021, Higgins released The Fire Waltz, a hybrid radio-play-podcast with a heavy music component. She also co-wrote the story and composed the music for One for Sorrow, Two for Joy, a musical theatre piece that uses puppets to tell the story of a woman living on the prairies in the early 1900s.
While the puppets won’t be making an appearance at YAC, Higgins says some of the songs from that show likely will
Tickets are only $10 and can be purchased at yukonartscentre.com.
