Little Miss Higgins uncorks an on-stage version of The Fire Waltz podcast at the Shadbolt
The singer-guitarist tells a story about a potato-farmer’s daughter who ended up in Southern Alberta to become a housekeeper—and it’s an important tale
Little Miss Higgins.
The Shadbolt Centre for the Arts presents Little Miss Higgins at James Cowan Theatre (6450 Deer Lake Avenue, Burnaby) on November 4 at 8 pm
IF ALL YOU know of Little Miss Higgins are the hits, you’re missing out. Now, we’re not denying that her “Bargain! Shop Panties” video is so cute and sassy that it’s guaranteed to raise a smile. Meanwhile, her rowdy take on 1920s blues icon Bessie Smith’s “Me and My Gin” makes it abundantly clear that the spirit of the Mississippi Delta is alive and well on the Canadian prairies. But the Alberta-born Jolene Higgins has ambitions beyond making novelty entertainment—and among them is wanting to spend more time at home in Manitoba, working with her partner and their child to turn their two-and-a-half acre farm into something of an oasis.
“I find it hard, leaving home,” she readily admits. “But now that I’m on the road I’m having a great time! Performing again is wonderful, but if you’re going to be making a living doing this you’ve got to be a road warrior like Corb Lund or Gordie Tentrees, and I don’t know if I have that in me.”
When we catch up to Higgins, she’s somewhere near Maidstone, Saskatchewan, having wisely pulled off the road to take our call. Overhead—and as far as the eye can see, in fact—are thousands of migrating Canada geese, making their way from the tundra to greener pastures south of the border. The singer-guitarist’s own peregrinations are pulling her west, however, and when she comes to the Shadbolt Centre for the Arts she’ll no doubt perform the aforementioned hits. But she’ll also uncork an on-stage version of the work that’s preoccupied her during the pandemic years: a podcast called The Fire Waltz. Having completed five episodes of the series—which encompasses Higgins’s family history, meditations on the complex and conflicted relationship between settler and Indigenous cultures, and lively musical performances—she’s already looking at two more years of digging into and dramatizing her feisty great-grandmother’s life.
“Telling a story about a potato-farmer’s daughter who ended up in Southern Alberta and became a housekeeper… Why is that story important?” she asks. “But it’s interesting because of all of the little details. I never met my great-grandmother, but hearing these stories of her, I thought ‘Wow!’ She left her husband in the early 1900’s, which was something women didn’t do. She was also from a Catholic family, and Catholic people didn’t get a divorce… you couldn’t, you know! It was an abomination. And yet she did, and she found a way to keep her children safe, her two daughters—one of which would have been my grandmother.
“I just feel that we need to share with the next generation the fact that women weren’t allowed to go into bars in the early 1900s. Or that back then women were just getting the vote. I think it’s important that we keep these stories alive, and tell them from a different perspective. Telling this story from a potato-farmer’s daughter’s perspective is so interesting, and it’s so real, and so needed.”
Higgins’s ability to make the leap from feisty blues femme fatale to radio historian makes more sense when you consider that well before she picked up her vintage Kay electric guitar she already had a theatre degree and quite a bit of on-stage experience under her belt.
“I would’t call myself a blues musician,” she stresses. “I can play blues music, and I love country blues like the old Memphis Minnie stuff, but I think my desire for stories and story-telling will sometimes trump my musicianship and take over. I have this sort of dual personality going on as a performer and a story-teller, and then the other side of me is a musician.
“I think, as an artist, my job is to bring things to the forefront in a way that some people might not experience or see,” she continues. “It’s always interesting to me to try and do that. Yes, I’ll write a song like ‘Bargain! Shop Panties’ and it’ll be my hit, and I’ll be like ‘But I wrote this song about Louis Riel! What about that song, and what that means to us!’
“It’s all about finding a balance,” she adds. “When I grow up I want to be a comedian, and I love making people laugh, but I also like making people feel things, whether it’s laughter or sadness or empathy.”
The Fire Waltz is a collaboration between Higgins, Ghost River Theatre artistic director Eric Rose, and Calgary songwriter Kris Demeanor, and it was originally envisioned as a music-theatre piece. The three first got together in the fall of 2019, and began by extracting a show’s worth of song titles from the Higgins family archives. “Kris and I went away and wrote 18 songs in 12 days. It was ridiculous!” Higgins says. “And then I went home to Manitoba, and the project got shelved when the pandemic hit. But I was like ‘I’ve got to keep going.’ And I listen to a lot of audio books and a few podcasts and I also listen to old radio plays, so I said ‘This could be a radio play! It could be an audio experience.’”
Reverse-engineering it for the concert stage has been easy and enjoyable, Higgins affirms, noting that Demeanor and bassist Gilles Fournier will join her in Burnaby. Nonetheless, staying home and expanding the saga still has its appeal—so if you want to see this entertainer’s road-warrior side, it’s best to catch her while you can.
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