Toronto Blues Society | » Georgette Fry

Georgette Fry

Published June 1, 1996 in Features
Georgette Fry

Georgette Fry

Georgette Fry

Georgette Fry will be appearing at several music festivals between June and September, including: the 10th Anniversary of the du Maurier Downtown Jazz Festival in June; the Heineken Soul ‘n’ Blues Festival, the Home County Music Festival in London, the Wolfe Island, and Perth Theatre Festivals in July; the Blue Skies Festival in early August, followed by concerts in Kingston’s Grand Theatre. In September she’s off to Fredericton for the Harvest Jazz & Blues Festival and in December she heads out to Prince George, B.C. to do an R&B Christmas concert with the Prince George Symphony. On top of all this, Georgette has a regular Thursday night at a local Kingston blues club, Brandee’s, which she is loathe to give up because, in her words, “the place packs out consistently and it keeps us in musical shape for touring”.


Even though this August will mark the 20th year of her career as a professional singer, Georgette Fry would tell you that she’s been singing for as far back as her memory takes her…which would be since around age four. Georgette joined her first band in 1976 and spent the first 15 years playing weekends while she worked the inevitable day job, took part-time studies at university, and had three children. In 1987, the family moved to London, Ontario where Georgette gave up her day job in favour of playing more music and it was here that she met up with the other two members of what would become the acoustic blues trio, One Flight Up, which performed at the Harbourfront Centre Soul ‘n’ Blues Festival and Water’s Edge Coca Cola series in the early 1990s.

It was in London, in 1991, that Georgette made the decision to direct her energies more fully towards a recording career and she set herself a goal that within five years she would put out a solo CD and see what kind of response it would get from the public, the press, and the music industry. Her debut CD, Rites of Passage, which was produced with the help of many close musician/friends (and with a generous grant from the Ontario Arts Council), was released on August 4, 1995 and has been met with excellent reviews, extensive radio play, burgeoning sales, and a Juno nomination in the Blues & Gospel category for 1995. During the last 10 months, over 2,000 copies have been sold from the stage and through various retail outlets across Ontario and wider distribution east and west of this province is now happening through Sam the Record Man, HMV, and AVE while negotiations are underway for U.S. and international distribution. Although the response from the major Canadian labels has been very positive, no offers have yet been made and so the next step will be to approach some of the American independents when she returns from her western tour in June.

Although she has spent most of her life listening predominantly to Blues, Gospel, and R&B, Georgette would tell you that all good songs deserve to be loved, no matter what “category” or “genre” they occupy. As a result, Georgette’s live performances and her CD tend to be somewhat problematic for the “purist” in any given genre and it’s been the sole cause of any consternation expressed by the Canadian majors about Rites of Passage. The public, the press, and the music industry consistently remark that they hear country, jazz, rock, and pop in the songs she both writes and covers but everyone agrees that it’s all coming from a voice which starts from a whiskey-and-cigarettes centre, while each piece is draped in a patina which is unmistakably bluesy.

Most artists might find being in such a nebulous musical space frustrating, but Georgette finds it nothing short of fascinating. Perhaps she’s a little naive in assuming that “all music lovers love all good music” but her assumption isn’t necessarily unfounded. She’s found that, over the years, her audiences have loved whatever songs she’s presented on stage and that this experience had much to do with the selection of tunes she recorded on Rites of Passage. When asked to comment on this subject, Georgette’s response was: “Well, I initially set out to do a blues album because the blues is, afterall, my first and greatest love and I also know how wrapped up the music industry is in its need to be able to classify an artist, but I couldn’t escape the fact that there are some definitely-not-the-blues songs in my live repertoire (for example, Tom Waits‘ “On the Nickel”) which have become kind of ‘signature’ pieces for me over the years. Ultimately, I decided that I was doing this recording for my fans, first, and the music industry, second and that’s why I wrote that little paragraph on the back of the slick to warn the uninitiated that this wasn’t strictly a blues album. There was also another part of me which worried that, if I did, ultimately, get signed to a label, I might not get this kind of artistic freedom next time around, so I wanted to make sure I did something that made me happy and, yeah, I’m not happy being pigeonholed. And, you know, everything has worked out wonderfully because blues, jazz, country, and pop fans alike are letting me know that they love this CD. They tell me they’re playing it all the time and that one of the things they love most about it is the mix of the material…they find it very satisfying. So I couldn’t be happier, really.”

Georgette is about to leave for a six-city, eight-day tour of Alberta to promote her CD and finds it somewhat embarrassing to admit that, at age 42, this is her very first real tour: “In all my years of playing music in Ontario I’ve done plenty of out-of-town weekends where I got to stay in both nice hotels and some pretty funky dives. It’s not like I’ve been avoiding a life on the road because I love to travel. It comes from being an armed forces brat, I guess. If you don’t learn to love moving around a lot, at least it becomes second nature to you. But I did have a lot of life’s exigencies to juggle for so many years that travel would have made things impossibly complicated. My children are a lot older now and live with their dad in Montreal and they’ve always been one-hundred-percent supportive of my choice to have a career in music. Besides which, I didn’t see much point in touring until I had a recording to promote. I’ve been spoiled in my home town and throughout Ontario by good-paying gigs with large and loyal audiences so I never saw much reason to stray too far from home. But I’m really looking forward to going out there, partly because I’ve never been west of Windsor (I spent most of my childhood in Europe) and I’ve heard from various western sources that I have a lot of fans out there, so I’m anxious to meet some of them. I get to go out east in the fall, too, which is great because I’ve never been east of Quebec City, and that was 20 years ago. So if all this travelling helps to get sales and distribution happening across Canada while I have a great time performing to new audiences, I’d say I couldn’t think of a better life.”

Georgette plans to go back into the studio to start production on her next CD because she has a bunch of new originals and, hey, the fans are asking when the next one is coming. Asked whether she finds all of this a little overwhelming, she replies: “I suppose I could get tired just thinking about everything that’s about to happen…but I doubt it. I mean, I used to work a full-time job, play on the weekends, look after three kids, and take a couple of university courses all at the same time and I did that for several years. Compared to that, this looks like a cakewalk”.

– Tom Schneider

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