Kat Danser’s bumpy road from Saskatchewan farm girl to Edmonton’s Queen of the Swamp Blues reads like an incredible romantic novel that should be solicited as a movie script.
In a telephone interview just prior to the release of her third album, Passin’ a Time, at the Arden Theatre on Friday, Nov. 5, Danser is a lot like her blues music — a refreshing open book about life.
Born in a Catholic Polish immigrant family, they were so poor the home was a granary built over a landfill site. “Once my dad pulled an entire bumper out of the garden.” She laughs a deep, throaty chuckle.
An honours student, Danser graduated from high school at 16, winning a basketball scholarship to the University of Brandon. The $1,400 only covered tuition and she lived out of her Chrysler Newport for a year.
After transferring to the University of Regina, she graduated with a degree in specialized social work and completed her practicum in Thailand at a leprosy colony. On returning to Canada, she moved to Alberta and worked in social services, was director of the Camrose Women’s Shelter and did a stint in palliative care. “But after 24 years, I was burned out multiple times and I couldn’t imagine myself doing it another 20 years.”
This light bulb moment occurred at the Canadian/American border in 2008 as Danser was driving down to Mississippi. “I felt I needed to go to the birthplace of the Mississippi blues and learn from it. I was looking to deepen my own blues’ identity.”
Danser’s early life was spent listening to the radio and to her mother play the autoharp. An uncle even gave her a button accordion. But creating music was a foreign concept, let alone singing the blues.
She describes herself as a “pop music castaway” until about a decade ago when an epiphany occurred listening to Bessy Smith’s 1923 recording of T’aint Nobody’s Business If I Do. “I was completely stunned. I felt like something really deep inside stirred me.”
In 1999, she impulsively bought a guitar and while taking lessons, “I started to hear music and chords. The words would just present themselves to me.”
Three years later she recorded a full-length bluesy-folk album, Ascension, a self-described “vanity project.” By 2007, Danser had recorded a second album Somethin’ Familiar, a straight-ahead blues disc that garnered a Western Canadian Music Award nomination.
In between the two albums, she divorced and left part of her identity behind. Modelling herself after early blues women, she became vocal in reclaiming her sexuality. “I wanted to explore the sensitive and disturbing parts of the soul.”
A six-month trip to Mississippi was the next logical step. Defying any remaining strands of segregation, Danser lived in cheap hotels on the African-American side of the tracks, becoming friends with David ‘Honeyboy’ Edwards, Mississippi’s oldest acoustic bluesman and Queen of the Blues Koko Taylor.
Both were supportive of her endeavours and in her 10-track, Passin’ a Time, the funky, laid-back hand of the Mississippi Delta blues is a powerful force. “Going to Mississippi was a huge leap. I became comfortable with my music and when you don’t have self-doubt, everything is possible.”
