Five- time Grammy Award winners, The Blind Boys of Alabama will tour Australia in 2020, taking in WOMADelaide, Port Fairy Folk Festival, Brunswick Music Festival, Theatre Royal in Castlemaine as well as well as a one-in-a-lifetime intimate performance at Sydney’s Pitt Street Uniting Church.
The Blind Boys of Alabama
2020 Australian Tour
Saturday February 29 – Perth (Details TBA)
Wednesday March 4- Pitt Street Uniting Church, Sydney
Friday March 6- Saturday March 7- WOMADelaide
Sunday March 8- Monday March 9- Port Fairy Folk Festival
Wednesday March 11- Theatre Royal, Castlemaine
Thursday March 12- Brunswick Music Festival, Melbourne
Saturday March 14- Sunday March 15- WOMAD NZ
The Blind Boys of Alabama have the rare distinction of being recognized around the world as both living legends and modern day innovators. Since the original members first sang together as kids at the Alabama Institute for the Negro Blind in the late 1930s, the band has persevered through seven decades to become one of the most decorated roots music groups in the world.
Since forming in 1939, few would have expected The Blind Boys of Alabama to still be going strong, but they’re as musically ambitious as ever, having partnered with a number of modern day masters in the last 20 years. Most recently the bands ‘Way Down In The Hole’ served as theme song for the first season of HBO series The Wire, subsequent Grammy-winning albums have found them working with the likes of Tom Waits, Ben Harper, Mavis Staples, Willie Nelson and Justin Vernon (Bon Iver). Vernon produced their 2013 album I’ll Find a Way, which featured contributions from tUnE-yArDs’ Merrill Garbus, Patty Griffin, Sam Amidon, My Brightest Diamond’s Shara Worden, and White Hinterland’s Casey Dienel.
Hailed by The New Yorker as ‘legendary’ and by Rolling Stone as ‘Gospel Titans’, The Blind Boys Of Alabama’s live shows are roof-raising musical events that appeal to audiences of all cultures, as evidenced by an international itinerary that has taken them to virtually every continent over their 75 years.