Blue Sound: Live at the Harvest Fest

Big Daddy G was the blues band led by Dave Glover, a guitarist from Whitby, Ontario, and his musical partner Tortoise Blue, a harmonica player, organist and singer. Between 1998 and 2002 the band made three albums for Reggies Records, picked up a JUNO nomination, won a Maple Blues Award and opened two shows for B.B. King. Richard 'Hock' Walsh, the original voice of Downchild, made his last recordings on the band's debut, and Tony Flaim was preparing to record with them when he died.

Glover was born on October 4, 1962. His mother loved jazz, and he grew up hearing Nat King Cole, Louis Prima and Tony Bennett around the house. When he picked up the guitar as a teenager he went looking past the rock charts and found the three Kings: B.B., Freddie and Albert. He learned the club circuit with his brother Jim in the Glover Brothers Rockin' Blues, and came out of it a player known more for touch and tone than volume.

Tortoise Blue, whose real name is Jeff Crivellaro, arrived with his own history. In the early 1990s he had blown harmonica and played accordion with the Bourbon Tabernacle Choir, the sprawling Toronto soul and rock collective, and his solos were a highlight of their live shows. He was a self-taught Hammond B3 player and a strong singer, and once he and Glover found each other in 1998 the two became the core of everything Big Daddy G did.

The first album, 4 Blues, came out in 1998. Glover produced it with engineer Karen Kane at Chalet Studios in Claremont and at Pizazzudio, and filled it with fourteen songs from the blues masters he loved, from T-Bone Walker and Muddy Waters to Albert Collins and Freddie King. Instead of one frontman he used a rotation of singers: Joe Toole, Rob Chorney, Gord Fogel and, on three songs, Hock Walsh. Walsh had drifted into semi-retirement and was recovering from a car accident when drummer Bruce Brooker tracked him down for Glover. He sang 'Woke Up This Morning', 'Teach Me How To Love You' and 'Made In The Shade'. Walsh died of a heart attack on New Year's Eve 1999, and those three tracks were the last recordings he made. The album closes with 'She's Into Something', cut by the old Glover Brothers band with Jim Glover on lead guitar.

Big Daddy G played the February 6, 2000 benefit for Walsh's son in Toronto. Tony Flaim, who had followed Walsh into Downchild, sang that night too. Flaim had been working with Big Daddy G as a guest vocalist, had done preproduction sessions for their next record and was days from going into the studio with them when he died in his sleep on March 10, 2000, at 51. Glover broke the news to the online blues community himself, and in May the band played Flaim's memorial benefit at the Horseshoe Tavern alongside Downchild, Fathead and the Cameo Blues Band.

That next record was Topless, released in 2000. By now Big Daddy G was a real band: Glover on guitar, Tortoise Blue on vocals, harmonica and organ, Wayne 'Shifty' Deadder on bass and Ted Peacock on drums. Most of the fifteen songs were Glover and Tortoise Blue originals, ranging over Texas shuffles, West Coast swing, Chicago grooves and a trip to the gospel tent, and one of them, 'Blues For T.F', was written for Flaim. The guest list read like a roll call of Canadian blues: Jack de Keyzer, Dutch Mason, Dawn Tyler Watson, Donnie Walsh of Downchild, saxophonist Pat Carey, Teddy Leonard and a young Southside Steve Marriner.

Topless put the band on the national map. At the 2000 Maple Blues Awards it was nominated for Producer of the Year, Glover was up for Songwriter of the Year and Tortoise Blue for Harmonica Player of the Year. In 2001 the album was nominated for the JUNO Award for Best Blues Album, in a field Sue Foley won with Love Comin' Down. At the 2001 Maple Blues Awards Tortoise Blue was named Harmonica Player of the Year, ahead of Carlos del Junco and Marriner, and he was nominated again the following year.

On September 15, 2001, four days after the attacks on New York and Washington, Big Daddy G made it to Fredericton and played the Harvest Jazz & Blues Festival. Richard Bell, who had played with Janis Joplin and The Band, sat in on piano, and Marriner joined on harmonica for the last three songs. Danny Greenspoon recorded the set in his Audio Truck, and it came out in 2002 as Blue Sound - Live at the Harvest Fest. The closing 'Rocket 88' turns into a harmonica duel, Marriner in the left speaker and Tortoise Blue in the right. Glover dedicated the CD to his daughters, Stephanie and Taylor.

The band worked the festival circuit hard in those years, playing the Montreal International Jazz Festival, Ottawa Bluesfest, the Beaches Jazz Festival, Mont-Tremblant, Festiblues in Montreal, Windsor, Kingston's Limestone Blues Festival and the London Blues Festival. A promoter who watched the crowd rise for them in London in the summer of 2002 booked them to open for B.B. King in January 2003, in Mississauga and at Hamilton Place. Glover had named his own guitar Shell, after his wife Shellie, so it could stand next to King's Lucille. Both nights ended in standing ovations, and in Hamilton King called Glover back onstage and embraced him in front of the crowd.

Glover kept the band going through the decade with a changing lineup that at times included bassist Darryl 'Harpo' Peterson, drummer Mike Fitzpatrick and keyboardist Denis Keldie. In 2007 he was sharing a bill with Jack de Keyzer and Danny Marks at the Oshawa jazz and blues festival and talking about a new studio album, the first in seven years. It was never finished. Dave Glover died in a car accident on February 20, 2009, in Pickering, at 46. Fifteen years later, one of his old bandmates wrote in the guest book of his online obituary that he still thinks of Dave every time he hears the Big Daddy G records.

-Robert Williston