William Prince coming to Killarney this Saturday
Juno Award winner William Prince is coming to Killarney this Saturday, October 16, bringing his brand of folk country and gospel to the Shamrock Centre.
Based in Winnipeg, Prince won the Juno Award for Contemporary Roots Album of the Year at the Juno Awards in 2017 for his debut album Earthly Days.
On his newest album, Gospel First Nation, William Prince tells a story through the music of his childhood, songs of faith, struggle and grace. These are songs he learned and sang with his father in the Prince Memorial Chapel (in the background of the photo).
The Prince Memorial Chapel, a one-room, wood-sided building, has stood in Peguis First Nation in Manitoba since 1929. The chapel, no longer in use, holds in its name a story of family, identity, and history that began a century before the chapel was built, and will continue long after it falls apart.
For Prince, the making of Gospel First Nation was an act of building a bridge between worlds at-odds, as a way to find harmony in conflicting, complex truths.
“As a young person, I never fully understood why the divide between cultural and Christian First Nations people existed,” says Prince. “In actuality, the very singing of these songs and belief in a Lord and Saviour is the success of a plan to extinguish Indian identity. This album is an amalgamation of two realms.”
In its humble and extraordinarily personal way, Gospel First Nation, honours this story while making a statement of startling, radical magnitude. William Prince says this album is 100 years in the making.
Opening for Prince will be country folk singer and songwriter Lucien Spence, who closed out the first annual Sights and Sounds Arts and Festival held on the grounds of Killarney’s Heritage Home for the Arts back in August.
Tickets are $30 for adults (14 and over), $20 for youth (12 and under), and tables of six for $150. Tickets are available at Lewis & Jones (532 Broadway Ave.), at Eventbrite (www.eventbrite.ca/e/178941678377), or at the Heritage Home for the Arts (44 Water Avenue).
The doors open at 6:30 p.m. and the show starts at 7 p.m.
THE PRINCE MEMORIAL CHAPEL – The rich baritone voice and country/gospel lyrics of Juno Award winning musician William Prince will be resounding in the halls of the Shamrock Centre on Saturday, October 16. Behind him is the one-room Prince Memorial Chapel, built in 1929 on Peguis First Nation land, which is where he first learned to sing with his father, a preacher and musician. ‘Gospel First Nation’ is his third album, and amalgamates “two realms,” he said.