Long Gone Lonesome
The Orkney-based production of Long Gone Lonesome, a collaboration between the Lone Star Swing Band and the National Theatre of Scotland, will be staged in the county again this May, in conjunction with the Orkney Folk Festival.
After a critically acclaimed tour of Scotland last autumn, as well as a sold-out run at Glasgow’s Celtic Connections festival, in January, the show will play in Orkney over the weekend of May 21-23; the weekend before the main four-days of the folk festival. Performances will take place in Westray, on Friday, May 21, Kirkwall, on Saturday, May 22, and finally in Stromness, on Sunday, May 23.
Long Gone Lonesome, a celebration of the life of Thomas Fraser, is an evening of song and story-telling in the hands of Orcadian western-swingers The Lone Star Swing Band, with novelist, playwright and musician Duncan McLean at the helm. Thomas Fraser (1927 - 1978) was a fisherman and crofter from the remote island of Burra, Shetland - and one of Scotland’s least known but most fascinating musical heroes. Obsessed with country and the blues, Thomas mastered the styles of his idols, such as Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Williams and Big Bill Broonzy, and made their songs his own. A shy, retiring man, he avoided public performance. Instead, he gave away to family and friends tapes he lovingly recorded in the croft. Thomas laughed at the idea that the wider world might appreciate his talent. But thirty years after his untimely death, those precious, fragile tapes have been reissued on several CDs, and his fame has spread to Nashville…
An evening designed to set your toes tapping, your heart racing and your emotions running high, Long Gone Lonesome “is both a defiant riposte to the cult of celebrity and a yodelling hoedown in its own right” (The Guardian).
This event is kindly sponsored by Talisman Energy