Canadian blues festivals and venues range from small, community-based festivals that feature mostly local performers to major corporate-sponsored festivals that draw nationally- and internationally-prominent blues bands and huge crowds. Some of the large festivals include the Ottawa Bluesfest, the Harvest Jazz & Blues Festival in Fredericton, New Brunswick, and the Edmonton's Labatt Blues Festival. These festivals, which are usually organized by volunteer-based blues societies, are an important part of the Canadian blues scene. Bluesfest International produces two shows on the third weekend of July in both Windsor and London, Ontario. The premiere event was in downtown Windsor in 1995 and the London festival was added 6 years later.
Canadian blues bands also appear at a range of venues, including bars, taverns, lounges, and community centre concert series. Only a small number of these venues specialize in blues music; in most cases, venues will have a "blues night" or an occasional blues series. Some of the best-known blues venues in Toronto are Healey's (named for former owner, the late Jeff Healey) and The Silver Dollar Room. Other well-known Canadian venues include Boon's House in Hamilton, Ontario, Café Campus in Montreal, Blues at the Bow Live in Alberta, Blues On Whyte in Edmonton, The Shamrock Hotel in Calgary, and The Yale in Vancouver.
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—Janet Frame (b. 1924)
“I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior F.B.I.- men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep- hole and missing laundry list school.... Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)
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—John Rhodes Sturdy, Canadian screenwriter. Richard Rossen. Joyce Cartwright (Ella Raines)
“The blues women had a commanding presence and a refreshing robustness. They were nurturers, taking the yeast of experience, kneading it into dough, molding it and letting it grow in their minds to bring the listener bread for sustenance, shaped by their sensibilities.”
—Rosetta Reitz, U.S. author. As quoted in The Political Palate, ch. 10, by Betsey Beaven et al. (1980)
“This is certainly not the place for a discourse about what festivals are for. Discussions on this theme were plentiful during that phase of preparation and on the whole were fruitless. My experience is that discussion is fruitless. What sets forth and demonstrates is the sight of events in action, is living through these events and understanding them.”
—Doris Lessing (b. 1919)