Little Miss Higgins considers no town or venue to be too small for annual Harvest Tour
The Winnipeg-based country-blues performer has more than just music in store for fans this time around—she also has her very own crop of garlic
Little Miss Higgins
Little Miss Higgins performs at the Shadbolt Centre for the Arts on October 1 at 8 pm
LITTLE MISS HIGGINS has dubbed an upcoming string of 19 concerts across Western Canada her second annual Harvest Tour. And you can take that name literally, not just because the tour takes place during harvest season.
The merch table at every show will feature some items that you won’t find anywhere else, including handmade soaps and even a little something the Winnipeg-based singer-songwriter cultivated with her own hands.
“I have started selling my garlic that I grow,” Higgins tells Stir during a telephone interview. “I’ve always loved growing garlic. If people have seen my show, they’ve probably heard me talk about my garden. It’s woven itself into some songs here and there. And one of the things I truly love is garlic, so I’ve been growing a porcelain hardneck variety called Music—of course, I had to.”
Higgins—known as Jolene to her family and the taxman—reveals that her garlic patch yielded about 1,000 bulbs this year. Not an industrial farming operation to be sure, but an ample crop for her purposes.
“We harvested it, hung it up to cure, and now I just have to trim it up and it’s ready to go,” she says.
If you’re getting the impression that this is someone who prefers to do things the old-fashioned way, the music she makes won’t dispel that notion. The Little Miss Higgins sound is an unabashedly retro one, and while she has dipped her toes into different streams throughout her journey—prairie-gothic blues on “Slaughterhouse—Revisited”, old-school country balladry on “Barns You Used to Dance In”, toe-tapping Dixieland jazz on “Beautiful Sun”—the common thread is that none of it sounds like a product of the current century.
Heck, she even listens to music in a way her great-grandparents would have recognized.
“I actually have a 78 player,” she says. “It’s portable, and when I do solo shows or house-concert tours, I’ll take my 78 player and DJ for myself in between sets. It’s pretty great. I’ve started collecting some pretty great 78s.”
She’s not likely to turn up at any of the Harvest Tour dates with a crate full of Elvis Presely, Johnny Cash, Everly Brothers, Ella Fitzgerald, Rosemary Clooney, and Mills Brothers records, but you never know. One thing we can report for certain is that she’ll kick the tour off on October 1 at the Shadbolt, where she’ll be joined on-stage by Eric Lemoine (banjo, lap steel, guitar) and Patrick Leclerc (standup bass).
That will be the lineup for the entire B.C. leg of the tour, which includes stops in Princeton, Castlegar, Cultus Lake, Lake Country, Rossland, and, of course, at the Frog City Cafe in Kaleden.
For those now wondering what and where the hell Kaleden is, it’s an unincorporated municipality on the west shore of the Okanagan’s Skaha Lake. While the town’s population is a little under 1,200, Frog City actually has a robust schedule of shows by touring artists from far and wide. The venue’s calendar over the next few weeks includes performances by Juno-nominated Nova Scotia sibling duo Cassie and Maggie, Sunshine Coast alt-rocker Daniel Wesley, and Australian bluesman Lloyd Spiegel.
Still, Kaleden is a bit outside of the standard touring circuit. Higgins doesn’t mind. She’s been performing in even smaller places since the early days of her musical career. Before she had made any sort of a name for herself, she reached out to around 30 venues in the prairie provinces in hopes of booking her first tour. Only one called her back: Twin Butte Country General Store & Restaurant in Southern Alberta.
“It’s a licensed Mexican restaurant slash post office slash general store,” Higgins explains. “The town is like six or nine people—depends on who you talk to—and it was amazing. We went and did the show, and it was so fantastic. From there, things grew, and I’ve continued to play these tiny little places. I love bringing music to those kinds of places, and I love that they support live music. The place in Twin Butte, I’ve been playing there for 25 years.”
In August, however, Higgins found herself performing in a slightly larger market—New York City—as part of the International Puppet Fringe Festival. One for Sorrow, Two for Joy is a puppet play about a woman living alone on the Prairies at the turn of the 20th century. Higgins created the show in collaboration with, among others, Calgary-based puppet maker and performer Juanita Dawn.
The singer’s involvement in the production grew exponentially as its creation progressed, she says: “At first I was just supposed to write the music, but then things shifted, and I ended up helping create the full story, and then I wrote the script and became the narrator and played music during the show. And now I’m doing some puppetry, and I love it. I really love it.”
Higgins has recorded five songs from the show, and these can be found on her Bandcamp page. She says she’s not sure if they’ll ever be released on a physical format—or, indeed, if any of her future music will, either. The boxes of CDs in her possession have her convinced that it’s not really a viable format for an indie artist anymore.
“One of my albums I’ll have probably forever,” she says. “It got nominated for a Juno, and I ordered so many of them, and then the next day, digital downloads became the big thing, and streaming. I still made CDs after that, but it was quite funny how it all happened.”
There hasn’t been a new full-length Little Miss Higgins album—released physically, digitally, or otherwise—since 2017’s My Home, My Heart. Higgins does continue to release music, however, one song at a time. She’ll have a new single, “I’d Like to Love You”, out on October 8, which happens to be the same date she plays Harry’s Hall in Castlegar.
“With every Harvest Tour I’m releasing a single,” Higgins says. “So, I’ve got a new single coming out to go with the tour, and I did the same thing last year. And maybe those songs will inspire an album. Or, y’know, maybe I could get a 78 made.”
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