Downchild brings more than 50 years of blues history to Massey Hall

For almost 55 years, Donnie Walsh has been leading Canadian blues music trailblazers Downchild, who will make their third headlining appearance at Massey Hall on Saturday night.

There have been highs and there have been lows, but the biggest taste of success for the Toronto ensemble occurred back in 1978 when “Saturday Night Live” cast members John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd adopted the personas of Jake and Elwood Blues and formed the Blues Brothers for a musical sketch on the weekly NBC comedy program in its early glory years.

The duo, who were an immediate hit, recorded their debut album “Briefcase Full of Blues” for Atlantic Records.

It topped the charts and eventually sold more than three million copies: important because there were two Donnie Walsh originals on the album: “(I Got Everything I Need) Almost” and “Shot Gun Blues,” as well as a third song made famous by the Downchild Blues Band, Big Joe Turner’s “Flip, Flop and Fly.”

Walsh didn’t receive any royalty credits for the Turner tune — incidentally, Downchild’s only Top 10 Canadian hit — but the North Bay-raised musician was shocked about a year after “Briefcase Full of Blues” sales exploded to find a six-figure residual cheque in his mailbox.

“The cheque was so huge I had to get somebody to help me carry it home,” Walsh, 76, joked last week from Etobicoke. “I guess it was a shock, but it was something that I knew about originally but forgot about until the cheque came.”

No wonder he christened the boat that he bought with the windfall “Almost”: he has spent many a satisfying hour on its deck during the past four decades landing bass, walleye and muskie in Ontario’s Lovesick Lake or 50-pound wahoo off the coast of Florida.

As Downchild has carried on through the years, the band has reduced its schedule from an average of 300 dates to about 50 a year, said singer and harp player Chuck Jackson in a separate phone interview.

“We’ve got to start thinking about one year at a time; we’ve got three guys over 70,” said Jackson, who has been Downchild’s singer since 1990.

“We’re slowing down a bit on purpose because of our ages. These days, we fly someplace for a couple of shows and then fly back instead of going on the road for three weeks, because it’s just too hard for us.”

Which makes Downchild’s Massey Hall appearance all the more rare and special: one-time regulars at Grossman’s Tavern, the Colonial Tavern and the El Mocambo, the band — whose current lineup includes Walsh, Jackson, saxophonist Pat Carey, pianist Tyler Yarema, bass player Gary Kendall and drummer Jim Casson — quit the tavern circuit more than a decade ago.

And with such guests sitting in Saturday as Grammy-winning producer Daniel Lanois, barrelhouse pianist Kenny “Blues Boss” Wayne and fiddler Natalie MacMaster, the show promises to be one for the ages. In a nod to late pianist Jane Vasey, who joined the band in 1974 and continued until her death from leukemia in 1982, Jenie Thai will both open the show and provide a rendition of the Vasey/Downchild hit “Tryin’ to Keep Her 88’s Straight.”

“It will be an exciting show,” promised Jackson.

Although he named the band Downchild after the Sonny Boy Williamson II song “Mister Downchild,” Walsh and his younger brother, Richard “Hock” Walsh, got bitten by the blues bug after hearing the album “Jimmy Reed at Carnegie Hall” when they were teenagers.

“The first blues artist that I ever heard that really turned my crank was (Mississippi bluesman) Jimmy Reed,” Walsh recalled. “He had semi-hit songs on the radio and me and my kid brother, we’d go out to record stores and try to find a Jimmy Reed album that we hadn’t heard or seen.”

In 1969, the Walshes formed the Downchild Blues Band, consisting at the time of themselves with bass player Jim Milne, drummer Cash Wall, and sax players Dave Woodward and Ron Jacobs.

At a time when Toronto clubs — especially those on the Yonge Street strip — boasted multiple-day and weeklong residencies by visiting artists, the city was a regular stop for all the blues greats.

“James Cotton became a friend because he came to Toronto frequently and, at the beginning, he’d play at a club and be there for a week rather than a couple of hours,” said Walsh, who held a day job as a cartage truck driver and played at night. “There was Muddy Waters and B.B. King: a lot of players came to the Colonial Tavern in Toronto and there were also blues artists who you wouldn’t hear of. It was a pretty interesting era.”

The band’s first album, 1971’s jump-style blues classic “Bootleg,” was immediately picked up by RCA, but it wasn’t until 1973’s “Straight Up” that Downchild gained a foothold on Canadian radio with both “Flip, Flop and Fly” and “(I Got Everything I Need) Almost,” the latter a recent inductee into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame.

Over the years, the relationship between the brothers Walsh would become strained, with singer Hock fired and rehired numerous times until 1990, when Jackson was recruited.

Rick “Hock” Walsh, also a founding member of the Cameo Blues Band, died of a heart attack in Toronto on New Year’s Eve, 1999, at the age of 51.

Whether it was jamming with harmonica legend Cotton or guitarist Buddy Guy, or recording with Spencer “Gimme Some Lovin’” Davis, Downchild rubbed shoulders with a number of greats throughout the past half-century. For their 50th anniversary performance at the Toronto Jazz Festival in 2019, the band was joined by Aykroyd, fellow Canuck Paul Shaffer, local guitar legend David Wilcox, Baton Rouge guitarist Kenny Neal, former Blasters pianist Gene Taylor and Finnish blues singer Erja Lyytinen.

Mainline guitarist Mike McKenna; Memphis Horns and Stax trumpeter Wayne Jackson; and ex-Rhinoceros and Lou Reed keyboardist Michael Fonfara, among others, were members of the Downchild lineup on different occasions.

Through the later years, Donnie “Mr. Downchild” Walsh and Chuck Jackson provided the original songs that muscled the band forward on such albums as “Good Times Guaranteed,” “Lucky 13,” “Come On In” and “I Need a Hat.”

Their travels have taken them to Central America and Europe.

“It’s all because of Donnie Walsh,” said Jackson. “Donnie is a Canadian blues pioneer. When the band started, he had to play all the bars across Canada that were mainly rock and country bars. He’d play up in North Bay. He’d play in Sudbury. If you went out west, that might have been the first time anybody saw a blues band. He paved the way for everybody else.”

Jackson, who is also founding director of the Southsideshuffle Blues Festival, celebrating its 30th anniversary in September, said he’s grateful three generations of blues lovers come out to see Downchild.

He says the blues continue to touch everyone.

“We all live it. No matter where we grow up, what jobs we have, how successful we are … we’ve all got our heartbreaks. We can all identify with it.”

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